Alpine managed to do that very modern F1 trick of being in plain sight while telling you almost nothing.
A short clip doing the rounds on social media on Tuesday showed a blue-and-pink car carrying Pierre Gasly’s race number threading through Maggotts and Becketts in properly miserable, wet Silverstone conditions. Alpine was on a filming day at the circuit, but it wouldn’t be drawn on the obvious question: was this the first public glimpse of the 2026 A526, or a carefully staged decoy?
From the angles available, it didn’t look like a straight re-run of last season’s A525. A few details stood out quickly to anyone who’s spent too long staring at F1 bodywork: an aerodynamic fin behind the airbox, the airbox itself appearing in a different configuration, and the wheel brows seemingly gone. The front wing endplate shape also looked revised and, intriguingly, cooling vents above the sidepods appeared to be covered up — either because Alpine didn’t need the extra heat rejection in those conditions, or because it didn’t want anyone getting a clean read on its packaging.
That’s the point of these low-key days. The regulations let teams run up to 200km on demonstration tyres, ostensibly for promotional purposes, and everyone knows the real value is the first live sanity check: does it start, does it shift, do the sensors talk to each other, and is anything about to fall off? In the first year of a new rules cycle — and 2026 is a proper one, with fresh cars and a new power unit era — that “boring” mileage is priceless.
What makes Alpine’s Tuesday interesting is the context around it. The same day Gasly was spotted at Silverstone, Alpine was also understood to be conducting TPC (Testing of a Previous Car) running at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya. Initially, it was thought both Gasly and Franco Colapinto were in Spain alongside reserve driver Paul Aron, but Gasly appears to have been redeployed to the UK to get that filming-day box ticked.
On paper, it’s simple logistics: split the programme, keep everyone busy, and bank as much preparation as the rules allow before the first proper pre-season shakedown in Barcelona. But it also plays into the pre-launch choreography teams love. With grainy wet-weather footage, a familiar-looking livery and a refusal to confirm the model designation, Alpine’s left rivals and armchair aerodynamicists doing what they always do in January: arguing over pixels.
There’s also a more pragmatic angle. Wet Silverstone is about as far from representative as it gets, which is perfect if you want to check systems without handing competitors a clean visual study of how you’ve interpreted the new aero framework. If the A526 really was what we saw, Alpine got meaningful operational learning while keeping the car’s most telling surfaces out of the long-lens comfort zone.
The timing is tight, too. Alpine’s 2026 livery reveal is scheduled for Friday 23 January — the same day Ferrari is due to unveil its SF-26. That sort of calendar collision is no accident; teams know exactly how loud the news cycle will be and how quickly attention moves on. In that environment, a mysterious filming day that has everyone debating whether it was “the new one” or not is a neat way of stretching a week of visibility into two.
As for the driver side, Alpine will go into the 2026 season with Gasly alongside Colapinto, and early mileage — even 200km of it — matters when you’re starting a new technical chapter. The first time a driver gives feedback on brake feel, steering weights, visibility and basic balance in a brand-new car can save days once proper testing begins. Even in the wet, you learn things that don’t show up in the simulator.
Alpine isn’t the only outfit already putting cars in front of cameras this month, but it may be the one most obviously enjoying the theatre of it. Whether Tuesday’s machine was truly the A526 or a cleverly dressed-up cousin, the message is the same: Alpine’s 2026 campaign is out of the garage and on track — and it’s already playing the paddock’s favourite winter game, daring everyone else to work out what they’ve really seen.
