The Athletic.

The race is on and Alpine says Oscar Piestri will be driving for it next year,

but Oscar Piestri says he will not be driving for Alpine.

What's happening?

Where's he going?

And how has F1's fourth best

team got itself into such a mess? I'm Ed's Draw, and joining me to untangle this web of

intrigue is Scott Mitchell. Well, Scott, here we are again. Plenty has changed since we last

convened a few days ago to talk about Fernando Alonto's Aston Martin move. Oscar Piastri, we said,

was the obvious choice to take the vacant seat. Alpine certainly thought that. But can you take us through what happened when they actually tried to make that happen?

Yeah, it's been a wild 48 hours or so, isn't it? We've had plenty of opportunities actually to do one of these podcasts. But we've just been waiting for it to play out to a certain level of stability, shall we say, in the storyline.

It's been absolute chaos.

And the peak of the madness was when, as you say, Alpine announced Piastri as a 2023 driver alongside Estabanochon.

But there was a telling absence in the press release, Ed.

Can you remember what it was?

Yeah, no quote from Oscar Piaastrow,

it's obviously when you get a driver announcement. It's standard procedure to have the driver

quote. And of course, Oscar Piacci's social media was completely quiet as well. So he was very

clearly not part of this. And Piaastri is already an Alpine employee. He's a reserve driver.

He's been a junior driver since 2020. He's

been under contract for years. So it wouldn't have been hard to get him an official, get an

official comment from him or even make one up and say it's from him. So it's easy to do if you

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