The Alpine team principal, Oliver Oakes, has resigned from the team with Flavio Briatore, the Italian who was once given a lifetime ban from Formula One, set to step up to assume team principal duties.
Oakes was appointed only nine months ago and the 37-year-old’s resignation, which a statement from Alpine read they had accepted with “immediate effect”, comes as the team replace their driver Jack Doohan with Franco Colapinto for the next five F1 races.
Briatore, who was operating as an executive director at Alpine, working with Oakes, will remain in that role but also assume Oakes’s responsibilities, making him the de facto team principal, a development that at one point might have been considered unthinkable.
The 75-year-old had been given a lifetime ban from F1 after his part in the “Crashgate” scandal at the Singapore Grand Prix in 2008. The Renault driver Nelson Piquet Jr alleged Briatore, the team principal, and chief engineer, Pat Symonds, had asked him to crash deliberately in order to assist Fernando Alonso, who went on to win.
Briatore and Symonds denied the charges but Renault did not contest them at an FIA hearing in 2009 and Briatore and Symonds both left the team. Briatore was subsequently given a lifetime ban from all FIA-sanctioned events. However, he contested that decision in a French court and it was overturned a year later.
Franco Colapinto is set to replace Jack Doohan at Alpine for the next five Formula One races, starting with this weekend's Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix at Imola. The 21-year-old Argentinian will race alongside Pierre Gasly until at least the end of the Austrian Grand Prix on 29 June.
It is the latest in-season elevation for Colapinto, who was signed for Alpine from Williams in January as a reserve driver. The move follows a nine-race stint in Formula One in the second half of 2024, stepping up for Williams in Azerbaijan and Austin after replacing Logan Sargeant.
He immediately impressed with two points-scoring finishes in his first four races, but big crashes in Sao Paulo and Las Vegas lowered expectations. Colapinto says: "I have stayed sharp, and I am as ready as possible with the team's race support testing programme, as well as on the simulator at Enstone. I will do my best to get up to speed quickly and give it my all to deliver the best possible results alongside Pierre."
He brings significant financial backing as well as a huge groundswell of support back home in Argentina, where his fame is second only to the venerated Lionel Messi.
His journey to F1 has not been a straightforward progression since journeying to Europe aged 14 for a start in karting. He went on to claim the Spanish F4 title in 2018, rising swiftly through the ranks with drives in F3 in 2022, which earned him a step up to F2 in 2024.
He has also driven sports cars and entered the Asian and European Le Mans Series, as well as the 24 Hours of Le Mans, showing a talent for adapting quickly to unfamiliar racing cars. Andy Martin
At the time Briatore said he did not see himself ever returning to F1 and since which he has been critical of the direction the sport has taken. However, in 2024 he was persuaded to come back by the Renault chief executive, Luca de Meo, as an executive adviser to the team now operating under Renault’s sports car brand as Alpine. It was a controversial decision given the enormous attention and negative publicity Crashgate had inflicted on the sport.
The team have also been through a series of staff and management changes in recent years, including the sudden sacking of team principal Otmar Szafnauer in 2023. Since which they have also lost the chief technical officer, Pat Fry, the sporting director, Alan Permane, the technical director, Matt Harman, the head of aerodynamics, Dirk de Beer, and the operations director, Rob White. Bruno Famin, who replaced Szafnauer, was in turn replaced by Oakes.
The team based in Enstone, who won four world championships in its guise as Benetton and Renault, all with Briatore in charge, has struggled to escape the midfield for well over a decade. Last year Renault decided to cease building their own power units at their Viry-Châtillon plant and instead to take customer engines from Mercedes as of 2026. They had made some progress under Oakes but are currently ninth in the world championship with six meetings concluded.
