The former Alpine Academy manager and Gasly rival behind Hadjar’s early success – Feeder Series

Once upon a time, he was level on points with Pierre Gasly in French F4. Later, he became an aerodynamics engineer and an F1 junior team manager. Now, Pierre Sancinéna has experienced one of the greatest achievements in his career with his protégé Isack Hadjar’s ascension to Formula 1. Feeder Series sat down with the 33-year-old to learn more about how he shaped the newest Red Bull Junior Team graduate.

By Perceval Wolff-Taffus

Isack Hadjar was only 14 years old when he first met Pierre Sancinéna. They were at the Circuit Paul-Ricard, then the home of the French Grand Prix. The French driver of Algerian descent was there to get his first taste of single-seaters with the Winfield Racing School; Sancinéna was there to engineer and coach drivers and help select the winners of the Volant Winfield.

Hadjar eventually won the Trophée Winfield, the prize for drivers under 15, and thus earned Winfield’s backing to enter French F4 in 2019. He also earned himself a personal coach in Sancinéna.

“I discovered Isack there and we immediately clicked. It was a good fit,” Sancinéna recalls. “His father was also there and we talked a lot together about engineering and single-seater technique. Isack’s father is himself a researcher and a physicist, so he is a real point of reference in the technical domain.

“I also told him I was a driver myself and a coach. We thought it would be nice to work together for his first season in single-seaters, so that’s how everything started.”

Testing was one matter, but the first real test came in Nogaro on the series’ annual Coupes de Pâques weekend, held in late April that year. Hadjar qualified seventh but scored only four points in what proved to be his worst weekend of the season.

“There was a technical issue and he was really upset, but he was so passionate. Already from his first race at the age of 14, he had this determination to win. It was not often that we could see this fighting spirit this young, and it really stunned me since I had coached quite a lot of drivers by then already. He was really into it. 

“So we spent 2019 together, but the next year was very unusual because of COVID. There was only one person allowed to accompany each driver. We went to all the circuits together and it really strengthened our relationship, with his parents too. We created some really nice memories even outside of the track with his family, his friends.”

After finishing seventh and third in his two F4 seasons, Hadjar graduated to the FRegional level. He began 2021 in Asian F3, the precursor to FR Middle East, before beginning his campaign in FR Europe.

While on the road in the Middle East, Sancinéna was Hadjar’s coach for racing – but not only racing. 

“He was also still in high school and I used to help him with his courses. I was a bit of a maths or physics teacher when he was far from school!

“At the same time, we used to analyse onboards and data while also reading maths and physics books. That was quite a fun time.

“Then we came back to Europe and FRECA and everything was set off with the Monaco weekend. Monaco was a totally crazy weekend; there were so many things at the same time, but in the end Isack had pole position and the win on Saturday morning. And then there was the call we received saying Helmut Marko wants to see Isack in his office right this evening. We spent all these moments together.

“He signed directly with Red Bull, and we still worked together for the whole year in FRECA. But afterwards, when he jumped to F3, things became more complicated.”

Sancinéna had been part of the Alpine organisation as an engineer and eventually a manager since 2015, four years before he met Hadjar. The Frenchman’s signing to the junior team of rival outfit Red Bull, however, meant their collaboration had to come to an end in early 2022.

“I was employed by Alpine and Isack was with Red Bull, so Red Bull saw at that point that it would be difficult for me and him to carry on together,” Sancinéna said. “So starting from F3, unfortunately we stopped working together, but it didn’t prevent us from seeing each other, from attending several races.

“And now he is in F1, which was the excellent piece of news I received at the end of last year. It is the result of so much work. He is the most determined and hardworking driver I know. I was really happy and proud of him.”

Hadjar will be joining Racing Bulls for his maiden F1 season after finishing runner-up in F2. Alongside Sauber driver Gabriel Bortoleto, he will be one of the two drivers with the least mileage in an F1 car, Sancinéna said.

“It will be a challenge for sure, but each one of his seasons were a challenge. He’s not a driver who had millions and millions to spend on testing. He always had to adapt quickly, and that’s one of his biggest qualities. He can arrive in a new track, in a new car, and be in the mix already. I trust him on that, and I think these three days of pre-season testing showed it,” he said.

“F1 is different from everything else he has experienced so far in terms of procedures, the names of people you work with, the speed of the cars. You need to adapt more than you would in other categories, but I’m not too worried about that. Of course, he will need several races to adapt, but he has the raw speed, and now he needs the experience, but he can’t invent that. Races are one and a half hours long, they’re much longer, there will be tyre management – but I know Isack. He’s the driver who I know has the most prepared head for a jump to F1. I know he knows how to read all this new information, new data, to digest it and learn from it.”

The rookies excepted, Hadjar has never raced against the drivers on the F1 grid. But one name will be familiar: Alpine’s Pierre Gasly, Sancinéna’s former F4 rival and a fellow Frenchman.

“It’s funny, and both Pierre and Isack became close too these last few months,” he said. “It’s a beautiful story.” 

The two will now face each other on track, much as Sancinéna and Gasly did 14 years ago back in French F4.

Sancinéna had made his single-seater debut a year before in 2010 in F4 Eurocup 1.6 – the precursor to French F4. It was a vastly different time to the end of the 2010s, when Hadjar made his debut. “We didn’t test a lot in the winter, much less than the youngsters do nowadays,” he said. “But I had this sense of serenity. I had zero stress. I was just so happy to drive, to be here. At the first qualifying at MotorLand Aragón, I set the third- and fifth-fastest times. It was really a big surprise.”

Sancinéna came into the FRenault-spec series as a relatively unfancied prospect. A late starter in racing, the Normandy native had taken part in his first karting competition only two years earlier. International karting stars such as Stoffel Vandoorne or Norman Nato had many years of additional experience.

Despite this promising start, Sancinéna slipped back later in the season as he “got caught up with all the pressure, all the expectations” of his rookie season. He eventually finished eighth in the standings, and over the winter he made a big change.

“In 2011, for my second year, I worked with a mental coach [Vincent Capillaire] to get back this serenity,” he said. “It was really the main aspect we worked on throughout the year. We did visualisation, of course, but also breathing exercises, relaxation techniques, anything that could allow me to get back this mindset of my first qualifying.”

Sancinéna was unlike many of his peers. Alongside his racing activities, he was also a student in the Lycée Pierre-Corneille of Rouen in the highly demanding mathématiques supérieures and mathématiques spéciales two-year post-secondary programme while training to become an engineer. He then joined the INSA Rouen grande école in September 2010.

“It was a big challenge for sure,” he said about balancing racing and academics. “We often say passion is one of the most powerful things, and this is really what drives me. There was a strong will from my family to carry on studies alongside racing so that I could get a diploma. I liked mathematics and physics, so I knew I wanted to go down that path, but it’s true I didn’t choose ease with maths sup. I didn’t pass all the exams in my second year.

“I eventually joined INSA Rouen because they had a degree programme for high-level student-athletes in which they adapted the timetable and the exams around competition schedules. With maths sup, if I was absent one day for a testing session or a race, I knew it would be hell to catch up with all the classes when I got back.

“With INSA, there was an advantage because it allowed me to become sharper on the technical side. Even if all my classes were not about automobiles, each time I applied what I could learn to racing, especially on topics such as fluid mechanics.

“At the end of the day, these were really the subjects I preferred, which was why I became specialised in aerodynamics. My goal was to develop race cars or sports cars in the future. And as a racing driver, it was perfect because I had the right level to give good feedback to my engineers – as an engineer and later a coach, to know how to talk to drivers and to understand one another.”

Over the course of his studies, Sancinéna learned “to be organised and prepared for everything, to already know how real life is aside from racing”. But the balancing act between engineering student and racing driver had its disadvantages too.

“When I was studying, I was only thinking about racing, but when you are racing, you have to forget all the other thoughts about exams or whatever,” he said. “It was sometimes a bit frustrating because I knew most of the drivers didn’t have these kinds of obstacles. They were able to only focus on racing. It was a bit hard, but these years were really nice.”

Sancinéna fought for the title in the first half of his sophomore single-seater season in the rebranded French F4, with two wins and five podiums in the first seven races. Despite taking two poles in the fifth round at Spa, he never returned to the rostrum after that and finished fourth, 42 points adrift of champion Matthieu Vaxivière. 

More critically, he finished level on 104 points with 15-year-old rookie Gasly, who collected two more wins than him and thus earned third place overall.

“At the start of the year, the target was to join FFSA French Circuit Team, and for that, I had to be in the top three in the standings, so there were a lot of reasons to be frustrated by the final standings,” he said. “Because of that, I didn’t receive the scholarship from the FFSA. I needed more financial support to carry on.

“I knew that continuing in single-seaters was starting to become more difficult, but my objective was to move to Eurocup Formula Renault 2.0, which was a super championship at that time.

“So I did some tests in Formula Renault. There was the Formula Renault 2.0 Alps, which was a smaller parallel championship. I tried to do it, but in the end it was still too tight for my budget.

“I got an opportunity to race in European F3 Open for the 2012 season, but I couldn’t do the full season. As usual, it was a story of budget. A sponsor withdrew in the middle of the season.”

Sancinéna completed only three rounds in the series and scored zero points. At that point, he realised he had to abandon his F1 dreams.

“My main target was always to reach the pinnacle of single-seaters,” he said, “but I was also realistic. I knew I would have to find a big sponsor or join an academy to continue, and unfortunately that didn’t happen. But I decided that I wanted to stay in single-seaters for as long as I could continue to develop as a driver from a technical standpoint.

“That’s what I still say to young drivers that I coach or I meet: even though it’s expensive, the single-seater is the best school you could do. If you perform well in single-seaters, it means you have learnt everything you need to have a great career in GT or endurance.”

The majority of feeder series drivers come to this realisation eventually. For most, it is a tough pill to swallow.

“These were very difficult moments,” Sancinéna admitted.

“Every night when I went to sleep, my only goal was to rise through the ranks and reach F1 one day. The day I finally realised I couldn’t continue in single-seaters, it was not easy. It was evidently sad. I was older than the others and I realised there was a gap between us. I knew it wouldn’t be easy and that it wouldn’t have mattered much if I moved up or not. I had to make peace with it and it was hard to accept. 

“But I had a great entourage around me to support me. It’s easier to move on when you realise there are other great things to do in motorsport, even if they aren’t F1.”

In the wake of that tough realisation, Sancinéna began to pivot more towards his engineering pursuits.

“In 2012, I was still a student at INSA Rouen, but I also had my operator internship in Dieppe at the Renault Sport factory. There was the competition workshop where the Formula Renault cars were assembled. I spent the whole summer working on the Formula Renault cars. It was at least my way to stay involved in single-seaters after that racing chapter had closed – even though I was only thinking about jumping in one of them!” he said, his smile evident over the phone.

“It’s true that it was not always easy. To see all your friends and former teammates fight on tracks while you work in the back office was not easy. Fortunately, this period didn’t last very long, and I was able to focus on other projects – in sport, in academics and in general.”

Following his graduation from INSA Rouen in 2015, Sancinéna joined Renault Sport, which then became Alpine, as an aerodynamics engineer on the marque’s production vehicles, such as the Renault Mégane RS and the Alpine A110R and A110S. Alongside these activities, he became the maiden Alpine Europa Cup champion in 2018, racing the very Alpine A110 cars he helped design.

Finally in 2022, Sancinéna moved to F1 not as a driver or as Hadjar’s mentor but as the Alpine Academy’s new development manager. 

“After five years with Alpine, I had quite a lot of contacts with Alpine’s board, and I got the opportunity to work on the Alpine Academy, to think about a new model, to give a new momentum to the academy,” he said. “I worked on a plan on the financial, legal, sporting sides. It was the time after [Oscar] Piastri, et cetera. It was difficult and there were a lot of things on which to reflect. We needed to rethink everything, how the academy works.

“For a year and a half, I was in contact with Enstone, where the academy was based, from my base in France. We produced a roadmap, and the idea was to work on having the best drivers possible because it has to be the prime objective of an academy.

“In my opinion, academies should be here to detect talents and money should not be a factor. The idea should be to help the drivers – why not by using some of the money from the F1 team’s sponsors?”

As Sancinéna suggests, the landscape of junior academies shifted significantly in the wake of Alpine junior Oscar Piastri’s infamous repudiation of an announced deal with the F1 team for 2023 to race for McLaren instead. But other changes – especially around who joins academies and who pays them – have been afoot as well.

“There has been a before and an after the issue Alpine had with Piastri. It’s clear that the teams are much more vigilant with the drivers they support to avoid the possibility that drivers that have been supported financially for years go race with a rival team. I think in contracts with young drivers, all the academies will have been modifying all the departure clauses,” he said.

Sancinéna left his role at the Alpine Academy in September 2024, and he now works with the French car brand as a customer experience manager. He continues to race in the Alpine Europa Cup as a gentleman driver while serving as a driver coach for returning French F4 driver Paul Roques.

Since Sancinéna’s departure from the academy six months ago, five of the programme’s 10 drivers – Kean Nakamura-Berta, Abbi Pulling, Sophia Floersch, Nikola Tsolov and Victor Martins – have also left the programme.

The departure of F2 race winner Martins, a FRenault Eurocup and F3 champion, was disappointing, he said.

“Victor is an excellent driver who has been a part of the Renault and Alpine family for so many years. He’s an enormous talent and that I appreciate a lot from a personal point of view, so it was not good news from my perspective. But I’m sure there were other reasons that I don’t know about. It’s a shame,” he said.

“It’s clear that now, we’re seeing drivers with a lot of budget joining academies, and these budgets are often used to do F1 tests. In any case, that’s not how I imagine academies would be. For me, the goal of an academy should be to bring the best talents possible to F1 or at least to bring them to a professional level. They could also very well go to IndyCar, endurance. There are multiple marques engaged in various series nowadays. For the academies, It opens up quite a few possibilities because in the end, there are only two seats at an F1 team,” he added.

“There is an economic reality behind this way of thinking, and it’s a victim of an industry that needs drivers with budget. But it’s not my philosophy at all. It might be a necessity, but it should not be the norm.”

Header picture credit: Dutch Photo Agency