Flavio Briatore has never been one for soft landings, and Alpine’s 2026 launch in Barcelona came with the kind of blunt warning that tends to linger in a garage long after the cameras have moved on.
With Alpine coming off a bruising 2025 that left it rooted to the bottom of the Constructors’ table, Briatore’s message to Pierre Gasly and Franco Colapinto was simple: the alibis have run out. A new car, the A526, has arrived. The line-up is set. And if the performance still isn’t there, he’s not interested in hearing why.
“This year is not an excuse anymore,” Briatore said at the launch, standing alongside Gasly and Colapinto as the A526 livery was revealed aboard a cruise ship in Barcelona ahead of the team’s first pre-season shakedown at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya next week.
It’s the sort of line that works on two levels. Publicly it’s a stake in the ground — a declaration that Alpine believes it’s done the heavy lifting early by pivoting to 2026 development, and that the team expects to be judged on what it turns up with now. Internally, it’s pressure. Briatore is effectively operating as Alpine’s day-to-day boss, and when he says there’s “not an excuse anymore”, he’s not just talking to the drivers.
Still, he was pointedly direct about what he wants from the cockpit.
“You expect the best,” Briatore said when asked what he wanted from his drivers this season. “We need two drivers. We need two drivers competing in there all the time and for the team, of course.”
Alpine hasn’t had that recently. Gasly carried the points burden last year, finishing 2025 with 22, while neither Colapinto nor Jack Doohan managed to score. Colapinto took over from Doohan mid-season, but the change didn’t spark the kind of turnaround Alpine desperately needed — and in a team that already looked bruised, the driver narrative became a convenient proxy for bigger shortcomings.
That’s why Briatore’s emphasis on “two drivers” matters. It’s less a throwaway line than a statement of intent: Alpine can’t afford to have one car floating in the midfield while the other disappears into the noise. Not if it wants to climb back into relevance.
Gasly, at least, is tied down. Alpine has secured him through to 2028, a sign the team still views him as an anchor around which it can rebuild. Briatore spoke positively about Colapinto’s winter work too, suggesting the team expects him to arrive sharper and ready to take the fight to his team-mate.
“Franco is here. I promise you, he’s done a very good winter,” Briatore said. “I hope he is doing much better results and is ready to compete with Pierre.”
That last part — “ready to compete” — is the bit that will cut through. Alpine doesn’t need Colapinto simply to be closer. It needs him to be properly in the mix with Gasly, because that’s how you extract weekends from a car you believe in. Briatore was clear that however good the engineering looks on paper, “the final beat is done by the driver”. In other words: don’t waste what we’ve built.
There was also a knowing edge to the way he spoke about the relationship between his two drivers. Briatore noted they’re “friends” and “working together”, then paused and smiled as he looked at them.
“For the moment, you are friends,” he quipped. “After two or three races, maybe the friendship is little bit low, or maybe it’s bigger, depends.”
It was delivered lightly, but the subtext is familiar to anyone who’s watched an internal team dynamic turn once points, reputations and contracts come into play. Alpine’s best-case scenario is that a competitive A526 forces both drivers into a higher gear. The risk, as always, is that if the car is genuinely capable of something, the gloves come off quickly — and management suddenly has a different problem to solve.
As for the car itself, Alpine is keeping its cards close. Briatore admitted the team doesn’t yet know where it sits in the pecking order, which is about as much as anyone can say with a straight face at this stage of the year. But he repeatedly returned to the idea that the ingredients are there.
“We have a good car. We have a supersponsor. So, all the packages together, we just expect [to be] successful,” he said.
The A526 has already turned a wheel in anger — or as close to it as you can get on a permitted filming day — with Alpine running the car at a wet Silverstone earlier this week. It’s a small but important milestone: early mileage, early checks, early opportunity to catch issues before the proper pre-season work begins.
Now comes the part Briatore will care about most: whether the promise translates once the stopwatch is running and the paddock starts drawing its first, unforgiving conclusions.
Alpine’s launch week sits in the middle of a busy early-2026 build-up, with more unveilings and shakedowns to come. Williams is next on the calendar, due to reveal its new livery on February 3. For Alpine, though, the headline has already been written — by its most famous operator.
No excuses. Two drivers. A “good car”.
Now they have to prove it.
