Alpine's Laurent Rossi has clarified the thinking behind the team's unusual upper management structure. Unlike most teams, who appoint a Team Principal to lead, Alpine have split their management across several people. Executive Director Marcin Budkowski has assumed the role usually seen as the 'Team Principal', having stepped up to take over after the departure of Cyril Abiteboul over the winter break, while Davide Brivio has been brought in from MotoGP's Suzuki Ecstar team to operate as Racing Director. "We do have some sort of ‘super technical director’ in the person of Marcin [Budkowski]," explained Laurent Rossi, CEO of Alpine, to RacingNews365.com and other members of the media. "[He] sits in the factory mostly but he comes to some of the races. "We do have a racing director in the person of Davide [Brivio] but he doesn’t only come to the races, he is also in the factory. "In fact, the sharing of responsibilities is very clear, in fact, among the three of us. If you look at all the other teams, I challenge you of finding a similar structure in each of the teams." The team with the closest structure to Alpine is McLaren, who have Andreas Seidl as their Racing Director reporting to CEO Zak Brown. "At the end of the day it’s just how you split the responsibilities," Rossi explained. "In our case, we pretty much know that a car is essentially an evolving prototype from race one until the end of the last race, so Marcin will bring the best out of the power unit in Viry [Chatillion], and the chassis in Enstone, bring it on the track, work alongside Davide to improve that car over time. "At the end of the day, the two of them will have 80-90% of the team principal responsibilities and the rest falls into my remit."
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