Oliver Oakes might be able to lay claim to being the quickest team principal in F1, but for the meantime however, he has his work cut out in saying the same for his Alpine team.
Oakes, 36, is the latest incumbent in charge of the Enstone-based team that in recent seasons has seen it slump steadily towards the back of the grid.
Now, though, after a period of turbulence, he is hoping that alongside Renault’s CEO Luca de Meo and Flavio Briatore, who is acting as a special supervisor to Renault’s F1 project, the trio can bring some stability and deliver an upturn in results for the beleaguered team.
Oakes has racing pedigree. His father Billy was the founder and owner of the former Formula Renault and British F3 team, Eurotek Motorsport.
He started karting at just four years old and in 2005 was crowned the world karting champion. At one point was part of the Red Bull Junior Team alongside Sebastian Vettel, Brendon Hartley, Jamie Alguersuari and Sebastien Buemi.
When we meet in the Alpine hospitality unit, the subject of his early motorsport career quickly pops up, and he jokes that if he suggested he was the quickest team boss, then he might be getting a text message from McLaren’s CEO Zak Brown, who also continues to compete, rather sharpish.
“Sometimes I was quick,” he says when asked by Motorsport.com what went wrong with his own driving career, “but ultimately not quick enough, hence why I am on this side of the fence! I had my moments. [Red Bull motorsport advisor] Helmut Marko has been pretty brutal that I did not translate that into cars. I think he he is half-right. I did in some cars but not all of them.
Oliver Oakes, Carlin Motorsport. Formula BMW Testing, Silverstone, England
Photo by: Edd Hartley
“I don’t know why it did not work out. Perhaps I should ask myself that and do some soul searching! When you look back to then, obviously when you were young, and there were things you could have done differently. There were some things that didn’t go your way. It is a mixture of things.
“Like everything in racing, there is not one silver bullet. But I also feel quite lucky from the other side that I did do all of that; from karting all the way up to F3 level and came out of it and achieving a dream another way.”
Oakes is referring to the Hitech GP team he set up in 2015 and now runs successfully across six different championships, including Formula 2 and Formula 3.
Having grown Hitech GP as a…
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