The challenges facing Alpine ahead of F1 2026

After finishing dead last in the 2025 constructors’ championship, Alpine will attempt to bounce back in the upcoming Formula 1 season.

What can the French outfit do with a largely unchanged team alongside a new engine partner? Ahead of its season launch in Barcelona on Friday, let’s delve into its prospects.

What's new at Alpine?

The main change for 2026 at Alpine is the team’s switch to customer Mercedes power units. For the first time in the brand’s history, a Renault-owned F1 outfit won’t use its own engines.

It won’t be a first at Enstone, as it raced with Mercedes power in the 2015 season under the Lotus name. As Benetton, it only started to use Renault powertrains in 1995.

The decision was made by then Renault CEO Luca de Meo, who has since departed the company, and was deeply unpopular within the Viry-Chatillon engine division.

The team has also lost some partners, in particular Microsoft, which has switched allegiances to Mercedes.

Meanwhile, reserve driver Jack Doohan has left the squad to pursue a potential career path in Super Formula, leaving Paul Aron and Kush Maini as its test and reserve drivers – but only the Estonian is eligible to a superlicence.

What's the biggest challenge to Alpine?

Proving that it’s capable of building a race-winning chassis – and when we write ‘race-winning’, we specifically mean ‘on merit’. Esteban Ocon’s victory in the 2021 Hungarian Grand Prix was not undeserved, don’t get us wrong, but it wasn’t exactly a truthful reflection of the car’s actual pace.

Esteban Ocon, Alpine A521

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

Other than that, the Enstone-based squad hasn’t won since the 2013 Australian Grand Prix with Kimi Raikkonen, and its lack of success has often been blamed on its engines.

The team finished last in the 2025 constructors’ championship, so it has a lot to prove.

What's the strongest asset to Alpine?

In 2026, Alpine’s strongest asset might just be its Mercedes power unit.

Mercedes is believed to hold an advantage over all other engine manufacturers, partly thanks to an astute interpretation of the new rules regarding the compression ratio of the internal combustion engine.

If this translates into an actual performance gap, Alpine will have all cards in hand to succeed.

What's the goal in F1 2026 for Alpine?

Alpine openly stopped the development of the A525 remarkably early last year – pretty much around May – in order to focus on the new rules. That’s partly why it scored just 22 points when its closest rival, Sauber, had 70 to its name.

Lead driver Pierre Gasly has been performing rather consistently at a high level and took those hardships on the chin, but he would now grow restless in the absence of meaningful progress.

Alpine will hardly have anywhere to hide in 2026.