Otmar Szafnauer confident Oscar Piastri contract decision will go Alpine's way

Alpine team principal Otmar Szafnauer has said that he is confident that the contract decision concerning Oscar Piastri’s future will go in favour of his team.

The FIA’s Contract Recognition Board is set to meet next week and decide which of the two contracts Piastri has apparently agreed with Alpine and McLaren will stand for 2023.

Indeed, the decision will be revealed soon after the Board meets next week, and so we should then be able to start putting this saga to bed, after it began to rage a month ago at the start of the summer break.

Alpine put on social media that they had promoted Piastri to one of their seats for 2023 only for him to say that he would not be driving for them next year, with it quickly becoming apparent that McLaren were keen on signing him too.

Thus, we now find ourselves in this situation with a dispute to be settled and, on Saturday, at the Belgian Grand Prix, Szafnauer was asked how confident he was that the case would go his team’s way:

“Very,” he said.

“I have seen both sides of the argument and we are confident that Oscar signed with us back in November and there are certain things that need to be in the contract and I’m confident they’re in there.”

Szafnauer was asked to expand a little more on what he’d seen that made him so confident, to which he said:

“I rarely like to talk about details of driver contracts but two things I can say: one, there was no ‘by the 31st of July you have to do some things or therefore you can get on’ – there’s none of that. That 31st of July deadline that I read all the time is fictitious, it’s not in the contract that he signed.

“And the term of the contract, it is through 2024 with an option at the end of ’23. So I’ll just say those things, but there’s a lot