“Will look forward to when Laurent Mekies will take over,” Franz Tost remains hopeful for AlphaTauri’s future, says ‘it’s time to go’
Exiting AlphaTauri Team Principal Franz Tost talked about leaving the team in hands of capable leaders in his wake.
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Five races into the 2023 season, AlphaTauri is currently at the very bottom of Constructors’ Championship Standings alongwith Williams. Even though the team showed promise once they recruited former Formula 2 and Formula E Champion Nyck deVries to replace Pierre Gasly for this year, the results display an overall poor performance. And this has affected the internal environment of the Faenza outfit as well. As they have a total of 2 points after the first five races of this year, their leader Franz Tost went into a very public rant as he bashed his own engineers.
The Formula 1 world was taken aback when Tost had accused the AlphaTauri personnel, saying that he could not “trust” them. Later, he retracted his statement as he revealed the person he had felt was untrustworthy, has been dismissed from the team. Now, reports have confirmed that at the end of 2023, Franz Tost will see the exit from Red Bull’s sister team after 17 long years. And in his place, Laurent Mekies of Ferrari will become the new Team Principal of AlphaTauri.
Speaking on being replaced by Mekies, Franz Tost has accepted that he should now walk away from his duties after being the second-longest serving Team Principal in F1 history. The 67-year-old said, “It’s time to go…I think this is the time where I will hand it over to some other people who can do a much better job than me. It’s the correct way, I think, to do it, and I am more than looking forward to when Peter Bayer and Laurent Mekies will take over the lead [of] the team.”
Franz Tost remains proud of the AlphaTauri alumni like Sebastian Vettel and Max Verstappen
In 2006, Red Bull bought Minardi and turned it into their sister team with Toro Rosso. And a few years ago, the squad was rebranded as Scuderia AlphaTauri. Over the years, many racers from the Red Bull Junior Academy graduated into F1 to drive for AlphaTauri after having caught the eye of team executives like Helmut Marko.
After some good performances in AlphaTauri, some of those racers were promoted to a seat at Red Bull. Speaking on this, Tost said, “When Dietrich Mateschitz decided to buy the Minardi team, he said one of the main pillars is to educate the young Red Bull drivers, and this is what the team did. Looking back, there were some very high-skilled drivers like Sebastian Vettel, then, of course, Verstappen.”
On the other hand, Laurent Mekies’ move to a Red Bull-owned team from Ferrari has raised a few eyebrows in the F1 world. Several controversies have fired up regarding this as some believe Ferrari will trade Mekies with RBR Chief Engineer Adrian Newey in some sort of an agreement deal to exchange employees. But this has already been denied on both ends, and now it remains to be seen if more drama on this plot plays out in future.
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Riddhi Mondal
(1821 Articles Published)