Otmar Szafnauer is back in motorsport after the American was confirmed as the new chief executive officer and managing partner at Van Amersfoort Racing. The team, which fields cars in Formula 2 and Formula 3, has moved to secure the services of the 61-year-old who was out of work after previous spells leading Formula 1 teams.

Szafnauer has 20 years of experience in the F1 paddock but rose to prominence in a leadership role at Force India, having joined in 2009 and remained for more than a decade. He remained with the outfit when it was sold in 2019 to billionaire Lawrence Stroll, who rebranded the team first to Racing Point and later to Aston Martin.

He was team principal up until January 2022 when he left, and a month later it was confirmed that he had agreed to join Alpine as their new team principal. He lasted in that role for just 18 months, however, when it was brutally announced during the 2023 Belgian Grand Prix weekend that he and sporting director Alan Permane had been axed.

Having spent some time out without directly working with an F1 team, Szafnauer is now back in charge of another outfit in the form of VAR. He said: "Van Amersfoort Racing has a strong reputation for developing talent and competing at a high level across multiple categories. I look forward to working closely with the leadership team and the wider organisation to guide the next phase of the team's development."

VAR will hope that Szafnauer's experience and expertise can help push them closer to the front of the grid F2 and F3. In the former, the top feeder series to F1, the Dutch outfit has managed only two race wins across their four seasons up to now, and a best finish of seventh in the teams' championship.

They have fared slightly better at F3 level, with six total race wins to show for their efforts and their best finish yet in the championship last year when they ended the season fifth in the standings. VAR have one alum on the current F1 grid: Alpine racer Franco Colapinto drove for the outfit in F3 back in 2022.

Reflecting on his sudden exit from Alpine mid-race weekend in 2023, Szafnauer later said: "They wanted a corporate culture change in a different manner, to get rid of some people that were doing a good job that had been there for a long time. My thought was, well, if you get rid of people that do a good job then the message you send is, 'Do a good job, get fired', and that's not the culture that you really want. I was asked, and I said no. It's not who I am."

He also said he had "absolutely nothing to do with not signing Oscar Piastri correctly", after the infamous incident which saw him announce the Australian as an Alpine driver for the 2023 season only for the racer to deny it publicly and switch to McLaren. Szafnauer added: "That mistake was made in November [2021] - I started in March [2022]... I had no idea. They didn't submit the CRB documents correctly and never signed a contract with him."