Gasly, Colapinto bet on 2026 reset as Alpine flips the script with Mercedes power
Alpine’s 2025 was the kind of grind that tests a race team’s soul. Last in the Constructors’ standings. A points drought for Franco Colapinto and his predecessor Jack Doohan. And Pierre Gasly trudging through the leanest season of his F1 career. Yet as the 2026 rules reset looms, the mood at Enstone is oddly — and deliberately — brighter.
This isn’t blind optimism. It’s strategy.
Alpine effectively wrote off chunks of 2025 to move early on the new regulations, which bring sweeping changes to both chassis and power units for 2026. That long-term call comes with an even bigger philosophical shift: the team has shut down its in-house engine programme and will run as a Mercedes customer from next year.
In other words, a hard reset.
“I’ve just tried to take every single weekend one after another, without too many expectations,” Gasly said of the 2025 slog. “It was a very long tunnel the whole season, but knowing what we’re doing for 2026, I’ve always had that light. I’m going to be very happy to move away from that year.”
Gasly’s tone isn’t defeatist; it’s pragmatic. If the 2026 car opens doors, the sacrifices of ’25 were worth it. “If it gives me better results next year, I literally do not care about this season — and it will be all worth it,” he added. “Sometimes to achieve greatness, you’ve got to make tough choices.”
The decision to take Mercedes power is one of those choices. It unburdens Alpine of power unit development and hands the team a known benchmark on reliability and performance, but it also demands that Enstone nails the integration — architecture, cooling, packaging, the works — around a customer unit. That sort of plug-and-play doesn’t really exist in modern F1. If Alpine gets it right, though, the floor of their performance rises immediately.
The driver line-up stays put, which helps. Colapinto, kept alongside Gasly for continuity, sounds refreshingly grounded for a driver who endured a bruising rookie year.
“Next year’s car is going to be better than this year’s,” he said late in the season, before catching himself. “They are all very positive in terms of the base and the performance of next year, starting the simulations, but until you see it on track it’s difficult to say. I’m sure it’s going to be better than this year’s!”
It’s the right balance: hopeful, not starry-eyed. Alpine have seen enough sim numbers to feel there’s a car underneath them again, but no one’s pretending a laptop can predict wheel-to-wheel reality.
The upside to a year at the back? Freedom. Alpine spent 2025 learning hard lessons without the weekly pressure of upgrades destined to scrape for a point or two. That’s time and budget pushed toward the 2026 concept while others wrung out the last drops of the current regs. If they’ve uncovered a clean aerodynamic philosophy early, those months could translate to a vital head start when everyone unloads their radically new machines.
There are caveats. Regulation resets can compress the midfield and magnify small mistakes, and Alpine’s build quality, operations and development rate will be under the microscope the moment the new car turns a wheel. The transition to a customer engine also rewrites old processes overnight. There’s nowhere to hide if the first mileage is messy.
But if you’ve watched this sport long enough, you know the reset years are when teams with scar tissue can punch above their weight. Enstone has lived through reinventions before. The ambition hasn’t changed.
Gasly, for one, isn’t interested in silver linings from 2025. “It’s the season I’ve scored the least number of points in F1,” he said. “I feel I’ve put a strong performance out there, so it doesn’t really bring any satisfaction. These couple of weeks or months can potentially give us a head start on some other teams and bring much better success, which is what we are seeking, ultimately.”
The calendar will do the talking soon enough. For now, Alpine’s posture is clear: take the pain, bank the lessons, and swing hard at the reset with a tidier factory, a cleaner concept and a proven power unit behind the driver’s seat.
After a year in the dark, they’ve chosen to chase the light. Now they’ve got to build a car that can keep up with it.
