Guenther Steiner tells Alpine why they should not sign Mick Schumacher

With Mick Schumacher named as a contender for an F1 2025 seat by Alpine, his former team boss Guenther Steiner does not believe that is the right move, saying they must target “the best driver” on the market.

Alpine are looking to battle back from a rough start to the F1 2024 campaign which has seen them score only two points so far, but question marks hover over the futures of their drivers Esteban Ocon and Pierre Gasly, who are both out of contract as it stands come the end of the season.

Guenther Steiner tells Alpine not to target Mick Schumacher

With the possibility there that Alpine may need at least one new driver for their F1 2025 line-up, team boss Bruno Famin has confirmed that Schumacher – who previously raced at Haas under Steiner’s watch as team principal – is among their options, having impressed Alpine as part of his World Endurance Championship endeavours.

However, while speaking on the Red Flags podcast, Steiner stressed that as a works team, Alpine “should have the money to get the best driver on the market”, name-dropping Carlos Sainz, who will leave Ferrari at the end of the season and Yuki Tsunoda, who is shining with RB, as the pick of the bunch.

So asked if he would therefore not consider Schumacher if he were the Alpine boss, Steiner replied: “In the moment not, no.

“You need to get the best driver you know is out there. I think people which are showing that they’re very good.

“And as a works team, you need to do the best you can.”

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Ocon slammed criticism and speculation over his Alpine future following a first-lap collision with Gasly in Monaco, resulting in Ocon’s retirement from the race.

But with Ocon and Gasly having a history of not exactly seeing eye to eye, Steiner feels Alpine should consider the potential impacts very carefully when forming their 2025 driver line-up.

Asked if, as a team boss, he would be bothered by Ocon’s instances of clashing with team-mates, Steiner replied: “Obviously you think about it, absolutely you think about it, because it’s just something you don’t want.

“And I always say, team-mates don’t need to be the best friends, they don’t need to go out for dinner, but they need to respect each other. Because in the end, but it’s generally in life, you need to respect other people.

“If you don’t like to drive with this guy in your team, just go somewhere else. If I don’t like to be somewhere, I move on. I’m not trying to fight it at the cost of somebody else, which is the team.

“So one of them should have said, ‘I cannot be in the team with this other guy’, and somebody else maybe should have seen that. Everybody knows about the history of the two of them and even their parents apparently, they had to keep them apart.

“That’s not what you want when you’re going, ‘Oh, we will be team-mates, yeah it’s all good, we just fought the last 20 years, but now that’s all good’, you know?”

The likes of current Alpine reserve driver Jack Doohan are also among their potential 2025 options.

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