Alpine’s self-inflicted injuries

Renault continued in 1986 as an engine supplier to Lotus, Tyrrell and Ligier before a two-year hiatus. It returned in 1989, ironically in the same season that the turbo engines it had pioneered got banned, for a hugely successful nine-season spell as an engine supplier, taking a combined 11 titles in the back of primarily Williams, but also Benetton machinery before withdrawing again at the end of 1997.

The absence was brief as it bought Benetton in 2000, renaming it Renault in 2002 and starting its golden F1 age. The team was led by Flavio Briatore, the charismatic and controversial Italian businessman, put in place by Benetton who oversaw the team’s title successes with Michael Schumacher in 1994-5.

One of Briatore’s strengths was that he left the technical team alone to do its job and focused on ensuring both that it had the resources through commercial sponsorship and that it remained insulated from Renault’s more counter-productive ideas. He even had to push back on the idea of dropping the long-standing, and lucrative, Mild Seven title sponsor to make it possible to run in Renault’s colours, explaining not only the massive financial hit that would result, but also the fact that cash equals performance. With Fernando Alonso as its spearhead, it won both World Championships in 2005 and 2006.

This proved unsustainable. Alonso’s ill-fated move to McLaren was the most obvious manifestation of the team’s decline, leaving Renault with a solid but unspectacular line-up of Giancarlo Fisichella and Heikki Kovalainen. Rivals were upping spending, Renault didn’t keep pace and the enforced change from Michelin to Bridgestone rubber and wind tunnel correlation problems meant the slump was immediate.

That led to pressure building, something Renault president Carlos Ghosn made very clear with his far-from-reassuring public and private statements. That pressure contributed to the disastrous decision to try to manipulate the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix by asking Nelson Piquet Jr to crash deliberately, bring out the safety car and hand a decisive advantage to Alonso. This was exposed a year later and, in a world that was just starting its battle to recover from the global financial crisis, Renault offloaded the team to Luxembourg-based venture capitalists Genii Capital.

Under Genii ownership, Enstone had some success and won a couple of races with Kimi Raikkonen, but the cash soon dried up. When it sold the debt-ridden team back to Renault for £1 at the end of 2015, Enstone was on its knees. Renault’s board had been sold the idea of coming back into F1 and taking on Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull on a budget that was healthy, but not as big as its rivals’ – 80 per cent was the figure team leadership generally referred to. Originally, it had a five-year plan to get to the front, a timescale it later recognised was too optimistic given the unfettered spending war at the top of F1.

‘My quotation of five years was based on historic evidence with what happened when Red Bull took over Jaguar, Mercedes took over Brawn, when Renault came in after taking over Benetton, and those were in different eras,’ said then-technical director Bob Bell, another with a long and illustrious history at Team Enstone, in July 2018. ‘Formula 1 is significantly more complex, the teams involved are significantly bigger now than then, so I would say now that five years is a minimum. In terms of progress, we’re reasonably on track.’

Renault was on its way to finishing fourth in the constructors’ championship that season, a significant landmark as F1 had split into two distinct groups with a leading trio and a chasing pack. The next target was set to close the gap on the top three in 2019, spearheaded by $25-million-a-year signing Daniel Ricciardo. What followed was a hat-trick of fifth places, fourth in 2022 and what is almost certain to be sixth this year. The casualties of these failures were first Cyril Abiteboul, who took over as team principal from Vasseur in 2017 and was ousted at the end of 2020, then Marcin Budkowski, who led the team into the new regulations as executive director.

Renault’s fixation on timeline and targets was the tell-tale sign not only of a corporate-facing team, but an F1 leadership willing to play on these easy-fix timelines in its dealings with its owners. In the business world, three-year and five-year plans are a staple, but they rarely work in F1. The original five-year plan was replaced with one focused on challenging for wins when F1 introduced its biggest chassis rules overhaul in history for 2022.

It became clear long before the start of 2022 that this target would be missed, so it was time for a new project. To tie in with the team being rebranded as Alpine as part of Groupe Renault’s much-vaunted ‘Renaulution’ strategic plan, Rossi later revealed a 100-race plan to get the team to the front in F1. Another countdown had begun. He set another target for 2023, which was to finish fourth again, but closer in points to the top three than the chasing pack. Instead, Alpine was leapfrogged by Aston Martin and, having started more strongly than McLaren, was jumped by the Woking team too. Now it is effectively in a class of its own in the middle of the F1 pack, and even the revised target Szafnauer offered as emerging as the fourth-fastest team by the end of 2023 seems fanciful.

The timeline is central to the current situation. Bruno Famin, Vice President of Alpine Motorsports and with a brief to oversee the engine side of the team based at Viry-Chatillon, was the public face of the changes, taking interim command and appearing in a press conference shortly after the announcement of the departures of Szafnauer and Permane.

Famin is an experienced and accomplished engineering leader, but he had little to work with. He at least revealed disagreement over the ‘timeline’ for success was at the heart of the schism – Renault had a more optimistic timeline, Szafnauer a more realistic one – but when asked about the new direction the team will take he had nothing to say. His go-to line was to talk about ‘the project’, and when asked what the project was, he would generally reply it was ‘the project’. This was the muddied thinking of Groupe Renault in F1 encapsulated in tautological strategy.

Alpine F1 is supposedly at the heart of Renault’s strategy to reignite the brand globally. Judging by how little impact Alpine has made since its revival, it desperately needs the team to be a success to deliver on that ambition. Yet at every turn, the interventions and expectations of Renault management have been counterproductive, something exemplified by the loss of Alonso to Aston Martin for 2023.

Alpine expected Alonso to re-sign, but Rossi very publicly – and naively given who he was dealing with – made it clear he saw Alonso as close to the end of his career and cast him as a temporary seat-warmer for young gun Oscar Piastri. Alonso jumped ship, by which time Piastri, already frustrated by the team taking months to produce a contract to tie him to the team, had signed for McLaren. Alpine contested this, but was effectively laughed out of court by F1’s Contract Recognitions board because this supposedly binding contract was nothing of the sort. That was a careless and telling blunder.

So what now? Ideally, Renault will commit the resources needed to ensure Alpine can compete with F1’s big guns, which means ensuring it maximises the capital expenditure permitted under F1’s cost cap, and install a leadership that is left to get on with the difficult task of working its way to the front of F1 without Renault politics impeding it yet again.

If Renault isn’t willing to do that, perhaps it’s time to get out? Earlier this year, it sold a 24 per cent stake for €200m ($220m) to an American group including Hollywood actor and Wrexham FC saviour Ryan Reynolds, while Forbes recently valued Alpine F1 (not including the engine side) at $1.4bn.

F1 history proves Renault is most effective solely as an engine supplier and that, with the exception of those two glorious Alonso years, its works team under achieves. If it continues to go nowhere and Groupe Renault runs out of patience again, perhaps a fourth withdrawal will be on the cards. Which would be a shame, because despite all its troubles, Enstone remains a team with prodigious potential, just with very little of it currently realised.