Alpine has a strong youth program, from which, however, no one has recently managed to break into Formula 1. Also for next season, the possibilities for them are actually zero, as there is only one free seat available, and this one is not in the domain French teams.
They are currently leading in this year’s Formula 2 Championship Oscar piastri in Guanyu-Zhou, who are both members Alpine Academy. The Chinese is otherwise the favorite for the place at Alfa Romeo, but mostly thanks to a $ 30 million financial injection for the Swiss team. With his departure, the team academy would also lose so much financially Alpine.
But as he points out Budkowski, Alpine is aware of the problem and has a solution for it: “We get young drivers to a level just below Formula 1 and we have a lot of them. On the one hand, we want to put them in F1, and on the other hand, by having so many of them, our academy is gaining in importance. Even if they drive elsewhere, we want to keep in touch with them, so we have to make compromises, ” he adds Poljak.
