Otmar Szafnauer has had an illustrious career in F1. His time in the sport came to an end in 2023 after his exit from Alpine.
The 60-year-old played an integral part in building Force India from backmarkers in 2009 towards the front of the field. Under his guidance, the team pushed up to a best finish of fourth in 2016 and 2017.
Szafnauer remained with Force India when they rebranded to Racing Point after administration and later Aston Martin, before joining Alpine in 2022 as their team principal.
However, things took a sour turn at the Enstone-based team as they began to fall backwards during his tenure. The Romanian-American was sacked at the 2023 Belgian Grand Prix, with Szafnauer later saying certain Alpine personnel were ‘untrustworthy’ for how they handled the Oscar Piastri saga.
Szafnauer’s F1 career began in 1998 when he was hired as operations director for British American Racing (BAR). The team entered F1 a year later, and the 60-year-old recalled his time working with a ‘super quick’ world champion.
Otmar Szafnauer recalls it was ‘great’ to work with Jacques Villeneuve at BAR
BAR’s first F1 season in 1999 saw Jacques Villeneuve and Ricardo Zonta race with the team. The former had won the 1997 championship with Williams while the latter was a rookie.
BAR endured horrendous reliability issues as they failed to score a point all season – Villeneuve retired from the first 11 races and achieved the highest finish of eighth at Monza.
Despite the issues with the car, Villeneuve proved to be ‘super quick’. Speaking on the Formula For Success podcast, Szafnauer stressed it was important to have the Canadian in the team to understand where the car was in performance.
“He was there and he and Craig were one of the three founding members so to speak”, he said.
“So there was British American Tobacco that had the majority shareholding, there was Craig I think had 35% and Adrian Reynard had 15%. Craig and Jacques were a team as you know.
“Jacques Villeneuve was one of our two drivers in the first year, Ricardo Zonta was the other. And Jacques was great in many ways when he was there.
“He definitely wasn’t slow. You always need at least one super quick driver to show you where the car is, always, always, always.
“Otherwise you’re questioning yourself, you don’t know if it’s driver or it’s car. Are we good enough? Are the others better than us? So Jacques definitely was able to do that for us”.
BAR is now Mercedes – the rest is history
Following the 1999 season, BAR announced Honda as their engine supplier – later rebranding to BAR Honda. Points finishes were irregular in the early 2000s, with Villeneuve scoring two podiums in 2001.
The team achieved their best finish of second in 2004 with Jenson Button and Takuma Sato after a dramatic turnaround in performance. A year later, Button and Sato were banned for two races after being disqualified from the San Marino Grand Prix for their cars being underweight.
Honda bought 100% of BAR in 2006 and continued for three seasons before abruptly leaving the sport in 2009. The team were bought by Ross Brawn for £1 and went on to win the championship with Button.
Brawn GP were taken over by Mercedes in 2010, who have since gone on to have incredible success in F1. The Silver Arrows won seven consecutive drivers’ championships with Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg and eight constructors’ titles from 2014-2021.
