Alpine eyes 2026 reset after bruising 2025: “We’re on plan, on track”
Alpine’s 2025 numbers don’t need much dressing up. Tenth in the Constructors’ standings, 22 points on the board, and one driver doing all the scoring. The A525 never quite woke up, and when it did, Pierre Gasly’s sixth at Silverstone was the outlier, not the trend. Franco Colapinto and Jack Doohan left their rookie stints empty-handed.
But the story inside Enstone was never really about 2025. It was about calling time early and pushing chips across the table on 2026. Renault’s works power unit project wound down, Alpine inked its Mercedes customer deal for next year, and the factory lived under new leadership in a turbulent season that saw team principal Oli Oakes resign after Miami. In came long-time paddock operator Steve Nielsen as managing director, working alongside executive advisor Flavio Briatore — a structure that raised eyebrows but, by all accounts, tightened the focus.
Now, with the new rules looming and an A526 due to break cover on January 23, Alpine insists the long game is paying off.
“I think we’ve done all the right things,” Nielsen said in Abu Dhabi. “The chassis has passed its crash tests. It’s lighter, it’s stronger. Looks good — but every team says that before it hits the circuit. The stopwatch decides.”
There’s no pretending 2025 was anything but attritional. Development on the A525 slowed to a crawl as the team pivoted early to the new regs, leaning hard into the fresh aerodynamics, energy management demands and the much-talked-about straight-line mode. That trade-off only makes sense if the new car lands on its feet fast.
Racing director Dave Greenwood sounds confident it will feel natural soon enough. “Next year looks a bit more complicated, but only at the start,” he said. “Three races in, it’ll feel like the norm. The job is to develop our tools and help the driver as much as we can.”
The big technical squeeze for 2026 is weight. At 770kg minimum, it’s a universal pain point. Alpine won’t hang numbers in the air, but Greenwood says the design office has attacked the target “with energy and vigour… it’s aggressive, but not unachievable.”
The engine shift should be a material reset, too. Mercedes power won’t hand anyone instant podiums, yet it simplifies life after a turbulent hybrid era for the Renault unit and frees Alpine to concentrate on a car concept built around known performance and packaging. For a team that slipped 48 points behind ninth in 2025, that clarity matters.
And it’s not just parts and processes. Culture comes up repeatedly when Nielsen talks about Enstone. He knows the place — the Benetton/Renault years, the title runs in 2005 and 2006 — and says the old rhythm is still there, just older, more stubborn.
“There’s a spirit and a can-do,” he said. “Our factory is averaging 55-hour weeks to get this car out, and we don’t have trouble with people doing it. F1 isn’t a normal industry. People understand the sacrifice.”
That’s the sales pitch, but also the reality. Alpine has been publicly bullish before and still found itself on the wrong side of the midfield. The 2026 regulations are a genuine reset for everyone; a wrong turn in concept or correlation can put you on the back foot until autumn. Head start or not, there’s no substitute for rolling out and finding speed on a Friday.
The ingredients are there: a lighter, crash-tested chassis, a new power unit partner, a hungry factory, and a driver in Gasly who did the heavy lifting this year and has a knack for dragging results from awkward cars. The unknown is whether the early bet on 2026 translates to lap time by the time the circus hits round three — about when Greenwood expects the new normal to feel normal.
After a year spent looking at taillights, Alpine doesn’t need fireworks. It needs a car that behaves, a baseline that lets Gasly race in clean air again, and a development path that actually moves the needle. They say they’re on plan. Now comes the part this sport never negotiates: proving it at speed.
