One other hyperlink between Method 1’s previous and current has been severed – for now. Alessandro Alunni Bravi may not be a family identify for followers however the announcement that he’s to depart Sauber places much more distance between F1’s company current and its previous as Bernie Ecclestone’s private fiefdom.
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Alunni Bravi certified and labored as a lawyer whereas moonlighting as a journalist for Italian publications Vroom and Autosprint, initially at weekends earlier than touchdown a full-time gig masking F1 for Autosprint within the early 2000s. However arguably the making of him was a request to take care of some authorized niceties surrounding the organisation of a European F3000 race within the Sicilian coastal city of Cagliari in 2002.
Euro F3000, just like the GP2 sequence which supplanted it, was an enterprise run by and for Ecclestone pals, and the request got here from the Cagliari occasion’s patron, Pasquale Lattuneddu, a proud Sicilian and Bernie’s paddock ‘enforcer’.
For a minister with out particular portfolio in F1, Lattuneddu wielded extraordinary energy and was handled with the deference usually reserved for Mafia dons. On his say-so paddock passes might be granted or pulled. In case you had been a group supervisor and he decreed that one in every of your vans was parked out of actual alignment with the remainder, somebody must abandon no matter different urgent activity they may have and finesse it into its appropriate place.
Although it finally proved to be short-lived, the F3000 race round Cagliari’s Stadio Sant’Elia was a ardour undertaking for Lattuneddu. Choose F1 media had been flown out all-expenses-paid to publicise it.
Alunni Bravi was rewarded for his work by receiving a wider position within the following 12 months’s occasion, which included a ‘Sardinia F3 Masters’ race received by the up-and-coming Robert Kubica. Within the fullness of time Alunni Bravi would turn into his supervisor.
Alessandro Alunni Bravi, Driver Supervisor with Nicolas Todt, Driver Supervisor and Gerard Neveu, Promoter of WEC
Photograph by: XPB Photographs
Lattuneddu’s patronage opened doorways elsewhere within the wider Ecclestone friends-and-family community. After a spell operating Trident Racing in GP2, Alunni Bravi acquired a suggestion from one other supremely well-connected determine, Nicolas Todt, co-founder of ART Grand Prix and proprietor of All Highway Administration, whose portfolio included the likes of Felipe Massa, Jules Bianchi and Charles Leclerc. The relationships Alunni Bravi made right here led to his transfer to Sauber in 2017 through former ART co-owner Fred Vasseur, who was leaving Renault’s F1 group after a brief however sad spell.
It is understood that, after the torturous political absurdities of Renault, Vasseur needed an ally at a senior degree – and made Alunni Bravi’s set up on the Sauber board a situation of accepting the group principal position. Vasseur’s transfer to Ferrari six years later led to an evolution for Alunni Bravi, into the unwieldy job title ‘managing director and group consultant’, since incoming CEO Andreas Seidl didn’t need to be the entrance man.
Having spent so a few years quietly and fortunately working behind the scenes, having to look in televised press conferences in group package represented one thing of a tradition shock. It’s no shock that Alunni Bravi’s most popular mode as ‘group consultant’ was a choose gathering of media over espresso and pastries, encounters no much less convivial for being invitation-only.
It is now eight years since Liberty Media booted Bernie upstairs right into a ‘chairman emeritus’ position. A US company beholden to shareholders and compliance may in poor health afford a handshake-deal service provider rattling round on deck. Shortly afterwards, phrase circulated that Pasquale wouldn’t be returning to his duties within the 2017 season. An period had handed.
And now one other previous ‘face’ has clocked out. However, given Alunni Bravi’s relative youth (50), for a way lengthy?
On this article
Stuart Codling
Method 1
Sauber
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