Nielsen swats away grand “plans” as Alpine bets the house on F1 2026
Alpine’s 2025 season never really got out of first gear, but the team insists the long game is finally in play. With Renault shuttering its Viry power unit programme and Enstone switching to customer Mercedes power for 2026, managing director Steve Nielsen is cutting through the noise: no glossy roadmaps, no “100-race plan,” just a hard reset and a harder grind.
“I’m not a person who believes in a 100-year plan or a three-year plan or a five-year plan,” Nielsen told select media in Abu Dhabi. “You put the best people in the right roles, give a clear mission, get everyone marching in the same direction, and you work as hard as you can. You mill away at it. It’s a slow, grinding process, and you hope eventually you do a better job than everybody else.”
Alpine needed a change of tack. The A525 was a handful and the return on development was diminishing by the week, so the team made the call to pivot early—very early—towards the incoming 2026 regulations. That’s where they’ve poured their time, their wind-tunnel hours, and increasingly, their hope.
The logic is clear: at the beginning of a rules cycle, there’s fresh ground to be won. Those who committed early will have logged more learning, more correlation, more chances to make the inevitable missteps in private. And Alpine, bruised by a lean 2025 that yielded just 22 points, is banking on exactly that.
“I can tell you we’re building a better car than we had last year,” Nielsen said. “I can’t tell you whether that will line up on the grid in first or 10th through 20th. I don’t know.”
Inside Enstone, the mood is more purposeful than punchy. Racing director Dave Greenwood says the internal markers are being hit, even if nobody’s keen to trumpet specifics. “We’re very happy with where we are,” he said. “We’re absolutely on plan, on track for everything we need.”
The Mercedes partnership is a major pivot point. With Renault stepping back from power units, Alpine will run as a customer team in 2026, a move that strips out some variables but adds a more conventional challenge: make the most of a known quantity and integrate it seamlessly into a brand-new chassis concept. For a team trying to rebuild its identity, that stability—paired with fewer distractions—isn’t the worst outcome.
Nielsen knows what a rebuild looks like. He’s lived one at Enstone before. “I was here when Renault bought Benetton the first time around. It took us three years to win a race and five years to win the championship,” he said. “That metric doesn’t necessarily hold true today. It might be shorter, might be longer. You just do the best you can.”
The reality check is welcome. Alpine’s “100-race plan,” trumpeted under previous leadership back in 2021, has become a slightly awkward footnote after four seasons of turbulence, reshuffles and missed steps. The new line is less glossy, more grounded: redefine the structure, recruit where you’re weak, and accept that there are no shortcuts.
On track, 2025 didn’t offer many highlights, but Pierre Gasly did his best work in the margins—dragging the A525 into points windows on the right Sundays, with a standout sixth at Silverstone. That, broadly, is the bar for 2026’s opening salvos.
“I want to be racing every week and hopefully for points,” Nielsen said. “All too often [in 2025], we’ve been distant at the back, and that’s not where this team belongs. We need to race at the top end of the midfield for points every weekend.”
That’s the target. Not moonshots, not podium talk—just relevance, consistency, and the occasional Saturday surprise. From there, momentum.
If you’re looking for signals, pencil in January 23: that’s when Alpine will take the wraps off the A526. Under the skin, it’s the product of a long, deliberate head start on 2026’s sweeping changes. Outside, expect a car that needs to do the heavy lifting of restoring belief at Enstone.
It’s a reset, not a reboot. And if the tone from the top is anything to go by, Alpine finally sounds like a team ready to put one foot in front of the other and keep going—even if it’s uphill for a while.
Concept image: 2026 Alpine F1 car by Shaurya Nayar Design. Courtesy @shauryanayar.design.
