How a world karting champion ended up an F1 team boss

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.

“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 business and a successful team, Oakes feels he can utilise his experience as a former driver turned team owner to good effect at Alpine, where he will now focus his full attention.

He added: “Definitely having a little bit of the driving background helps, you have to be careful not to do too much, because you think it is the engineers or its the car…and its not the driver. But then you can balance that and go too much the other way.

“Actually it is kind of strange. If someone asked me today, what do I think has been the biggest help having taken this job, from my background, I think it is a mixture of all of it. 

“The driving bit was pretty decent but I was lucky my mum made me go to school. Although I used to complain like hell to her on a Monday morning and going in for 8am after I got back in the early hours from racing in Italy!

Paul Aron, Hitech Grand Prix

Photo by: Formula Motorsport Ltd

“And then also building and growing my own company, from the business side; those six teams, 100 people and building that up.”If I put it all together in a mix, I feel quite fortunate that I had all of that and I guess you call it a different education. I had a racing education.”

When James Vowles took over at Williams from Mercedes, he hit the headlines for mentioning how he was shocked the team was using an Excel spreadsheet for managing more than 20,000 car parts, saying it was “impossible to navigate”.

Oakes says he has not had anything comparable during his first few months at Enstone but does admit there are areas of the campus that require some investment.

“I sort of knew different facets of it from the last couple of year,” he said. “There has obviously been a lot of change. When Otmar [Szafnauer] was here, he was a mate, so through catching up with him occasionally, you’d learn things.”I arrived without anything much predetermined because you have to take things as they come and I dare say you never really get the truth until you get down in the weeds and see it. You have to suss things out for yourself.

“But since I have been here, lots has been talked about over the years, what has been done and for what reasons. At the moment I am front foot forward and we need o push on and the past is in the past.

“Some parts of Enstone have had a lot of investment and there are some parts that are still as they were, not quite as far back as Flavio’s time, but there are a lot of good bits and a lot of bits that we can keep improving but I think actually I would not say anything like [what Vowles found at Williams].”

Oakes replaced Bruno Famin, who was only in the role for just over a year while Szafnauer also had a similarly-short stint before being axed. And the Brit’s arrival coincides during a turbulent period as Renault ceases its F1 engine operation, causing disharmony within Renault’s plant in Viry-Châtillon.

Oliver Oakes, Team Principal Alpine F1 Team, Flavio Briatore, Executive Advisor, Alpine F1

Photo by: Alpine

Add into the mix Oakes will be working alongside the divisive character that is Briatore, who ran the Enstone team during its most-dominate period when it won the constructors’ and drivers’ championship with Fernando Alonso in 2005 and 2006.The Italian’s presence will only magnify the pressure on Oakes, but he says it is “a nice pressure”.

He added: “There is pressure for myself, yes, because I don’t like walking to the back of the grid. The job comes with pressure but I think it is different…I think years back a sport’s psychologist, who told me some thing that sticks with me. Pressure is like something that comes out of the shower as water pressure.

“I actually see leading a F1 team as a responsibility. There are a thousand people who rely on you for leadership to make the right decision. That’s one word I would use, and the other is competitive. You want to be the best.I am pragmatic in that I know F1 is complexed you have a lot of big teams that are well run and have been doing it for a long time with a lot more stability than us.

“But actually, I am quite excited about that because the great thing about F1 is that you are always judged constantly and if you can do a good job, everyone sees it. I put it on myself because I want to do well.

“Having Flavio is a great help and big part of why I committed to coming on this journey. I call it the project. He pushes because he wants to see this team go back to the front of the grid and anyone know knows him knows that Enstone is his baby.

“We all have a first love in life and he would not mind me saying that. For him, it is something that he really cares about and is what attracted me to doing this, and also working with him because he is hugely experienced. He’s hugely successful whether that be in F1 or his restaurant businesses and you know that he is committed.

“Ultimately maybe right or wrongly, I sat there and tracked back looking at teams that became successful in F1 and most of the time it was because of really strong leadership at the top and that can be two, three or four people really aligned and that is normally that is the owner and the senior management of the team.When I spent time speaking to him and Luca [de Meo], you could see their passion for the project. You could see that age is a number is is pretty about what drives you.”

Oliver Oakes, Team Principal, Alpine F1 Team

Photo by: Simon Galloway / Motorsport Images

Oakes though, is looking to stamp his own mark on the Alpine team. Insiders have praised his openness and willingness to communicate and already there is a sense of the mood lifting within the organisation and finally a feeling that the team is finally pointing in the right direction again. 

“There are a lot of different management styles,” he says. “It is interesting because you can see a real mix today. There was a bit of a trend of entrepreneurs, guys who started their teams and then ran it. Then there was another trend of ex-engineers being team principals.

“But everybody does what best suits their background. I don’t claim to be the best engineer or the best businessman, or the best driver. 

“I am all about, ‘if we are going to be successful we need to have the best people and a good culture to empower those people’. Those are the simple things we need to get right and something Enstone did really well in the past.”