Renault have been one of Formula One’s big names since it first joined the sport in 1977. The French owned company has been both an engine supplier and an on and off works team at various times over the years. Having re-acquired the Enstone based F1 outfit back in 2015, Renault have on the whole been underwhelming   and its latest rebrand to Alpine in efforts to promote its historic sports car brand must be seen as a failure too.

The corporate board of the French car manufacturer decided midway through last season to sack Alpine’s senior management which included team principal Otmar Schafnaeur, long time Enstone stalwart Alan Parmaine along with CEO Laurent Rossi and most recently Bob Bell who was snatched up by Aston Martin.

 

 

 

Alpine 100 race project

CEO Rossi who was appointed in 2021 set out the future for the F1 team claiming: “We have a long-term project, the objective is to reach a level of competitiveness that places us on the podium as many times as possible in 2024.”

“From today in fifth, you can easily find a roadmap. It’s going to be every year a bit better.

“It’s a 100-race project, four years, four seasons,” Rossi stated.

Clearly the Alpine F1 management paid the price for failing to deliver the plan. Worse than that, Alpine did achieve a high point when they finished the season following the big 2022 regulation changes, but since then have been on the wain. 

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Bottom of the F1 pile

Currently the team is no longer part of the midfield where it has been for years, but bottom of the pile and with no immediate solution to its plight. To make matters worse, Renault have lost all of their customer teams as their underpowered V6 Turbo hybrid project failed to live up to the heights of its previous championship winning V8 offering.

Alpine couldn’t be further from their 2024 objective of winning races as their drivers week in and out struggle to make it out of the first qualifying session. If designed to improve the team’s performance, the management cull has had completely the opposite effect.

Now rumours are again emerging from the paddock suggesting Renault is prepared to once again bail out of owning a world F1 team and is open to offers. Trailing home at the back of the field at each Grand Prix is not conducive to selling its quaint little sports car and equally damaging for the parent companies reputation.

Yet with no customer teams remaining, Renault finds itself in a bind. If it were to sell its Enstone based F1 team it would have no guaranteed presence on the F1 grid were the buyer to opt for a different power unit.

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Conditions for Alpine F1 sale

Already signed up with the FIA as an approved manufacturer for the new 2026 power units, motorsport-total.com reveals Renault are making a stipulation that any buyer continues to source Renault power units as part of the sale process. The timescale Renault are placing on the ‘locked in’ arrangement is said to be until 2029 as this will support the future of the engineers currently working on the 2026 project.

The problem for Renault is this stipulation reduces the number of potential buyers given their will be those who wish to source their own power units from one of the other manufacturers. Renault have had preliminary talks with Andretti under Rossi’s leadership and a deal was signed to supply the new American owned outfit until GM had built its own Cadillac branded version.

However, the American manufacturer is targeting 2028 for delivering its own power unit, two years before the Renault stipulation expires.

The other issue facing the Renault board is the value of an F1 team is based on its performance and with Alpine back of the grid at present, the price a buyer is prepared to pay will be lower than when the team was in the top four. And despite all the talk of F1 never being more popular than out is right now, the list of buyers prepared to pay north of £500m for the Enstone team is unknown.

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Upgrades masked by damage

Alpine brought upgrades to their car in Japan, but Esteban Ocon was cautious over how much extra performance they would in fact deliver. 

“These are small developments,” Esteban Ocon told Canal Plus.“But they’re not major. We shouldn’t expect a change in hierarchy really. But we will be interested to see where exactly the car stands in relation to the others with these new parts and how it behaves.”

The Alpine duo struggled for pace in the Grand Prix and trailed home with only Williams’ Logan Sargeant classified behind them. The main challenge the team are talking at present is to reduce the weight of the car which is said to be around 10kg over the FIA’s minimum weight regulation.

“We’ve also taken a little bit of weight off the car,” Ocon added, “which is a good thing – it’s free performance. So we’ll see where it takes us, but in any case, it won’t be a revolution.”

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Gasly “just a racing incident”

Any improvement from the Alpine upgrades were difficult to measure given both Ocon and Gasly received damage to their cars at the restart following the red flag in Suzuka.

Pierre Gasly revealed after the chequered flag, “The second start was very good, I managed to pass Esteban and get alongside Yuki and then unfortunately, I got sandwiched – Yuki turning left, Esteban right, and [he] ultimately touched me on the left side of my floor.

“After that, I was down something like 40 points of downforce, that it was pretty much game over – I was trying to stay out there, hoping for another red flag to make changes.

“It was just a racing incident, but it cost us a lot. It was a very long, very difficult afternoon.”

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China: Into the unknown

As Formula One returns next to China for the first time since 2019, all the teams face a challenging weekend in Shanghai. The new ground effect type cars have never run at this circuit and so the teams can’t properly simulate which setup is best for the circuit conditions.

Add into the mix, this is the first Sprint weekend of the year, so the drivers just have FP1 to acclimatise themselves to the conditions before Sprint qualifying on Friday afternoon followed by the one third distance race on Saturday morning. 

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