Otmar Szafnauer has questioned two of his former F1 teams - Aston Martin and Alpine - as they continue to underperform during the 2024 seas🏅on.

Szafnauer was a senior figure d🎀uring the Silverstone-based outfit’s days at Force India before remaining a key part of the team’s Racing Point and now Aston Martin era.

Under his leadership, Force India tended to out-perform teams which had significantly bigger bud𝓀gets than them - something that remained up until 2020.

However, since rebranding to Aston Martin - and Lawrence Stroll’s plethora of investment, aside from🦂 the first half of 2023, the team has struggled to deliver on its potential.

Sওzafnauer left the team in 2022 before joining Alpine as their new team boss൲ for 18 months.

Reflecting on Aston Martin’s underwhelming year so far, Szafnauer said on the : “Lawrence [Stroll] has put in plac💛e the infrastructure required for it to be a top team,” Szafnauer said of Aston Martin.

“They’ve hired, and I was part of it, a bunch of good people there. They ha✱ve two good driver♏s, and I’ve worked with both of them – Lance [Stroll] and Fernando [Alonso].

“For whatever reason – I’m not that close to it – my expectation was that their on-track performance would have been a little bit better than it♈ is now. I think they were maybe the sixth or seventh-fastest team at Silverstone.

“My anticipation was that they would be fighting for the top three, or definitely the top four. So there’s something amiss there or adrift. I don’t know what that is, yo🐼u’ve got to be close to it to understand what it is.”

Szafnauer hinted that t൩he expansion in facilities has potentially impacted how well they are “collaborating”.

“Is it really a great place to work? Are they really collaborating?” Szafnauer added. “Is everyone pull♉ing in the same direction? Do you have somebody in charge that understands the entire car, and is making good trade-off decisions between the trade-offs? Aerodynamics, mechanical,💃 car drivability, drivers – all that kind of stuff.

“I don’t know, I’ve been remo𒉰ved, I know what we 💙did when I was there.”

Alpine have undergone a number of ꧅management changes since Szafnauer’s departure, recently appointing Oliver Oakes as their new team principal.

Szafnauer feels Alpine were going in the right direction under his leadership before 🅺being forced out.

“Alpine is anot𓆏her reset,” he explained.“It’s unfortunate that I didn’t get the opportunity to continue on the road that I 🔯was going down.

“What I was doin🃏g there was convincing really good engineers and talent, not at the highest level but at the mid-level where the performance actually comes from, to come to join the team, because of the project that we were working on.”