Nowhere to Hide for 2025’s Slowest Team

There’s nowhere to hide for Alpine heading into the 2026 season.

A team that started out Formula 1’s last regulatory cycle as the best-placed to challenge the existing front-runners, and which it is easy to forget placed fourth in the championship, last year slumped to a distant last.

Alpine’s A525 was not a no-hoper, as the competitive nature of the field accentuated any deficits, but it was “Team Enstone’s” worst result since its nascent Toleman days of the 1980s.

Alpine’s dismal 2025 stemmed from a poor start to 2024, when it produced a lackluster and overweight car, and while improvements were gradually made the deficit left the team facing a mountain to climb.

Alpine was consequently one of the first teams to switch off the development tap in 2025, fully shifting its focus onto 2026, and the ambition is to turn the short-term pain into profit this year.

“We believe we are competitive,” said Alpine’s Executive Advisor Flavio Briatore. “We have been working very well. Our technical people have done a super job. Alpine is really coming back with performance this year.”

Briatore, who enjoyed success with the team under its Benetton and Renault guises in the mid-1990s and mid-2000s, has been steadfast in his belief that Alpine should be returning to podium contention this year, and looking significantly higher in 2027.

“We expect the best, this year is not an excuse any more, we have a brand new car, we have the same drivers,” Briatore said. “If the car is bad it’s our fault, we don’t have any problem to building this car, we have the budget, the technical [partner], the sponsors.”

Of course, one of the biggest decisions undertaken at Alpine was the decision to mothball Renault’s nascent 2026 engine project and instead become a Mercedes customer team. The decision has taken a wrecking ball to Renault’s rich four-decade history as an engine manufacturer, but it is a pragmatic call given the long-running feeling that the company remained behind its competitors in terms of outright performance and reliability.

McLaren’s recent success as a Mercedes customer team can act as inspiration. It was a decision driven by Briatore.“It is a partnership we are very much excited about,” Briatore said of the Alpine-Mercedes axis.

While relinquishing works status is a bold gamble, it does at least remove one of the long-running competitive question marks over Alpine, while also eliminating the recurring aspect of the chassis operations and power unit side blaming each other for any issues. Having a Mercedes PU in the back of the A526 provides a benchmark to three other teams and, as Briatore infers, means there’s no excuses. Alpine’s advantage—if it can be called thus—of being last in 2025 means that, at least for the opening half of the year, it will have the greatest wind tunnel and CFD time (along with newcomers Cadillac) under Formula 1’s sliding scale.

“We have a group of people who want to take this team to the next level and prove that last year was a blip,” said pragmatic Managing Director Steve Nielsen, who last year returned to Alpine for a third stint.

Alpine at least has some consistency in the driver line-up, with Pierre Gasly having committed his future through 2028, while Franco Colapinto has been retained after racing most of the 2025 campaign.

“It’s a big opportunity for us as a team and it’s a big opportunity for us drivers,” Gasly said. “It’s going to be very technical and there will be a lot of things to learn, probably to adapt to, but it’s exciting. At the end of the day, we all want to win. The team has done a fantastic job over the winter, preparing as best as they could. Obviously last year was quite tough but I think it actually made us a lot closer as a team. We managed to really dig into the work we were doing all together and that put us in a much stronger position.”

Colapinto failed to score a point in 2025 amid Alpine’s struggles, and came in for criticism from Briatore, but a first full off-season—after two partial campaigns—means the Argentine can finally tackle a season from the off.

“For the first time in my career, I have had a proper off-season in preparation for a full-time year right from testing and the first race,” Colapinto said. “For me, this is really important as I feel a real part of the project and it means I can really work hard with everyone at the team from the beginning.

“I will just try to learn as much as possible in the early races, keep building, keep growing and hopefully that will mean we can be competitive as a team.”