Another F1 figure connected with the Ecclestone era has gone

Another link between Formula 1’s past and present has been severed – for now. Alessandro Alunni Bravi might not be a household name for fans but the announcement that he is to leave Sauber puts even more distance between F1’s corporate present and its past as Bernie Ecclestone’s personal fiefdom.

Alunni Bravi qualified and worked as a lawyer while moonlighting as a journalist for Italian publications Vroom and Autosprint, initially at weekends before landing a full-time gig covering F1 for Autosprint in the early 2000s. But arguably the making of him was a request to attend to some legal niceties surrounding the organisation of a European F3000 race in the Sicilian coastal town of Cagliari in 2002.

Euro F3000, like the GP2 series which supplanted it, was an enterprise run by and for Ecclestone chums, and the request came from the Cagliari event’s patron, Pasquale Lattuneddu, a proud Sicilian and Bernie’s paddock ‘enforcer’.

For a minister without specific portfolio in F1, Lattuneddu wielded extraordinary power and was treated with the deference typically reserved for Mafia dons. On his say-so paddock passes could be granted or pulled. If you were a team manager and he decreed that one of your trucks was parked out of exact alignment with the rest, someone would have to abandon whatever other pressing task they might have and finesse it into its correct position.

Though it ultimately proved to be short-lived, the F3000 race around Cagliari’s Stadio Sant’Elia was a passion project for Lattuneddu. Select F1 media were flown out all-expenses-paid to publicise it.

Alunni Bravi was rewarded for his work by receiving a wider role in the following year’s event, which included a ‘Sardinia F3 Masters’ race won by the up-and-coming Robert Kubica. In the fullness of time Alunni Bravi would become his manager.

Lattuneddu’s patronage opened doors elsewhere in the wider Ecclestone friends-and-family network. After a spell running Trident Racing in GP2, Alunni Bravi received an offer from another supremely well-connected figure, Nicolas Todt, co-founder of ART Grand Prix and owner of All Road Management, whose portfolio included the likes of Felipe Massa, Jules Bianchi and Charles Leclerc. The relationships Alunni Bravi made here led to his move to Sauber in 2017 via former ART co-owner Fred Vasseur, who was leaving Renault’s F1 team after a short but unhappy spell.

It’s understood that, after the torturous political absurdities of Renault, Vasseur wanted an ally at a senior level – and made Alunni Bravi’s installation on the Sauber board a condition of accepting the team principal role. Vasseur’s move to Ferrari six years later led to an evolution for Alunni Bravi, into the unwieldy job title ‘managing director and team representative’, since incoming CEO Andreas Seidl didn’t want to be the front man.

Having spent so many years quietly and happily operating behind the scenes, having to appear in televised press conferences in team kit represented something of a culture shock. It’s no surprise that Alunni Bravi’s preferred mode as ‘team representative’ was a select gathering of media over coffee and pastries, encounters no less convivial for being invitation-only.

It’s now eight years since Liberty Media booted Bernie upstairs into a ‘chairman emeritus’ role. A US corporation beholden to shareholders and compliance could ill afford a handshake-deal merchant rattling around on deck. Shortly afterwards, word circulated that Pasquale would not be returning to his duties in the 2017 season. An era had passed.

And now another old ‘face’ has clocked out. But, given Alunni Bravi’s relative youth (50), for how long?