Alpine's new attempt to scale Le Mans heights

There was a nice symmetry when, on the Friday of last month’s Le Mans 24 Hours, Alpine unveiled the prototype with which it will attempt to rekindle past glories in endurance racing. The French enduro happened to fall on the same dates this year as in 1978, when the Renault marque finally triumphed in a race in which it had had a long, if interrupted, presence since 1963.

Much was made of that victory when the covers came off the new World Endurance Championship contender, which for the moment is known as the A424_ß. You could easily have misread that as A442B, the machine Didier Pironi and Jean-Pierre Jaussaud took to victory 45 years earlier, give or take the odd three days.

Alpine’s heritage in sportscar racing and at Le Mans is clearly important to a marque in the middle of a relaunch that kicked off with the second-generation A110 in 2017. Why else would it be stepping up with what can be described as its first full-house attack on the WEC, with an LMDh to be run by long-term partner Signatech, when its badges have adorned Renault-owned Team Enstone’s Formula 1 machinery for the past three seasons?

The marque is keenly aware of its history: it is continuing the three-digit nomenclature of both its prototypes and F1 cars. The A424_ß follows on from the A440 to A443 Group 5 and Group 6 prototypes of 1973 to 1978, as well as the badge-engineered ORECA LMP2 and P1 prototypes run by Signatech in 2013-22. The largely forgotten A500 test car developed at Alpine’s Dieppe facility ahead of Renault’s F1 entry with the first 1.5-litre turbo engine in 1977 set the tone for the A521, A522 and A523 grand prix cars of the modern era.

“Endurance racing is a huge discipline with a big media impact, one that is also part of the Alpine history,” says Bruno Famin, who heads up the LMDh programme as executive director of Alpine Racing at Viry-Chatillon, the just-outside-Paris HQ for all Renault’s motorsport projects after the A442B (correctly called an Alpine-Renault) had secured victory at Le Mans from the Dieppe workshops.

“We have F1, which is the main pillar for us, but this is a great opportunity because we have this new golden era of endurance coming at the same time as we have a massive development of the Alpine brand with three new models coming. Thanks to Signatech we have become established in endurance in the modern era and it is quite natural for us to use these new regulations to become part of the top category.”

Pironi and Jaussaud scored Le Mans victory in 1978 with an Alpine A442B

Photo by: Motorsport Images

Alpine had been dormant as a road-car make since the mid-1990s, though the Dieppe factory has turned out, among other things, the Renault Sport Spider and the R.S.01 one-make racer, but plans for a relaunch proper were hatched in the early 2010s, initially in partnership with Caterham Cars (there was a short-lived cross-shareholding deal between the two companies).

That coincided with discussions with Philippe Sinault, whose Signature single-seater team had made its first forays into sportscars in 2009. A deal was struck, he says, “around the table with a cup of coffee” to bring Alpine back into endurance competition.

The team’s ORECA-Nissan 03 LMP2 was rebranded after the French marque – it carried the A450 type number – and what turned out to be a successful assault was made on the 2013 European Le Mans Series. A second championship followed in 2014 prior to a graduation to the WEC and two more titles in 2016 and 2018-19. Alongside that there were three P2 victories at Le Mans.

“We looked at the two options, but quickly the decision was taken for LMDh. One reason was cost, but there is also the question of simplicity. To develop an LMH with your own hybrid system would undoubtedly have taken longer” Bruno Famin

Sinault makes no secret that his end plan was always a move into the top class of endurance racing.

“If you find your way to have an agreement with Alpine, the right place for this kind of manufacturer is the very top,” he says. “My target was always to build something to one day arrive in the top category.”

A step on that road was Signatech and Alpine’s assault on the new Hypercar class in 2021 and 2022 with a ‘grandfathered’ LMP1, the Gibson-powered ORECA design that originally raced as the Rebellion R-13 in the WEC in 2018-19 and 2019-20.

“We saw that the landscape of endurance was changing,” he explains. “I thought we needed to find a way to give everyone a little push in the right direction.”

Sinault’s aspirations to graduate to the Hypercar ranks started to be echoed by the Alpine hierarchy in 2021. Company boss Laurent Rossi made comments to that effect at Le Mans in August 2021. He admitted that a programme in the top class was under investigation and that the Le Mans Hypercar route was on the table as well as LMDh. 

Alpine competed in grandfathered LMP1 in the past two WEC seasons to prepare for LMDh bid

Photo by: Morgese / Gandolfi

Alpine never got very far down the road with an LMH, according to Famin. “We looked at the two options, but quickly the decision was taken for LMDh,” he explains. “One reason was cost, but there is also the question of simplicity. To develop an LMH with your own hybrid system would undoubtedly have taken longer.”

Famin suggests that such a task would have had “no benefit” even for a marque keen to showcase its technical credentials ahead of the launch of an all-electric range – all three of its forthcoming vehicles will be EVs. Using a next-generation P2 chassis as per the rules in LMDh, in Alpine’s case the ORECA, and the spec hybrid system produced by Williams Advanced Engineering, Bosch and Xtrac was the perfect route because, he says, “the added value is not in the hardware, it is in the energy management”. He points out that, as strictly controlled as the LMDh ruleset is, software is free.

ORECA was the obvious chassis partner given its ongoing relationship with Signatech and the wider Renault group. Famin suggests that had Alpine decided to go the LMH route, it would have been in partnership with ORECA.

The French motorsport giant supplies the engines for the Formula Regional European Championship by Alpine from its Magny-Cours facility and has a long-standing involvement in the marque’s junior single-seater programmes. It also developed the Megane RS Trophy one-make racer for 2009.

Students of junior single-seater history will remember that Alain Prost won the 1979 European Formula 3 Championship with Renault motivation in a Martini run by ORECA, though it is largely forgotten that ORECA fielded an A442 at Le Mans in 1977. It was easily overlooked because the car failed to last a lap before catching fire.

The ORECA tie-up was revealed on the announcement of the LMDh programme in October 2021. An entry prior to 2024 at the start of what is being billed as a four-year programme was never on the cards, partly because ORECA couldn’t begin work on the car until last summer. Until then it was busy on the Acura LMDh. Only when the Honda marque’s ARX-06 started testing could resources be diverted to the Alpine project.

A lid was kept on one key technical detail until the Le Mans launch of the A424_ß at Alpine’s new events centre. That was the configuration of the internal combustion component of the powertrain. It is a 3.4-litre single-turbo V6 that the manufacturer found, according to Famin, “close to home”.

ORECA's links with the Renault group stretch back to Prost's F3 title in 1979

Photo by: Motorsport Images

It has linked up with Mecachrome, a company with which Renault has a long-standing relationship in motorsport, as its development partner. The company headquartered in Blagnac in south-western France took over the three-litre V10 F1 engine programme for 1998, but the sporting links between the two companies stretch back far beyond that. When Renault expanded its F1 programme to include the supply of customer versions of its 1.5-litre F1 turbo in the mid-1980s, Mecachrome was chosen to assemble the engines.

The basis of the Alpine’s engine is the unit of the same 3.4-litre capacity used in the Dallara FIA Formula 3 and Formula 2 one-make racers, in normally aspirated form in the former and with a turbo in the latter. That means it has a clear link to the engine that powered the Ginetta G60-LT-P1 in its first season in 2018-19.

“It is close to the F2 engine,” admits Famin. “We are working with Mecachrome and at Viry-Chatillon to make it more reliable and to improve the consumption.”

“The differences between the manufacturers will be reliability and the use of the energy you have available. For reliability, the simpler the better” Bruno Famin

Asked about the single-turbo configuration, he says: “We were looking for an engine making 520kW [698bhp] and we had one close. We don’t need more power. The differences between the manufacturers will be reliability and the use of the energy you have available. For reliability, the simpler the better.”

That was one reason why Alpine never considered using its F1 1.6-litre turbo as the basis for its LMDh powerplant. Famin explains that it was possible to achieve the 520kW “in a much easier and much cheaper way, particularly in terms of maintenance”.

The Alpine LMDh was fired up for the first time at the start of this month and is due for a shakedown at the end of this month at Lurcy-Levis near Auvergne. Testing proper will then begin at Paul Ricard in mid-August and a first 24-hour Le Mans simulation has already been pencilled in for Motorland Aragon in November. Long-time Signatech driver Nicolas Lapierre will handle initial development duties. The Frenchman, who is not racing for the team on its temporary return to P2 for a kind of holding programme in the WEC this year, has been tacitly confirmed though not officially announced in that role.

Alpine isn’t talking about who will race its two LMDhs in 2024 as yet, though Sinault admits that “it is not difficult to imagine our current drivers are on the list”. That means Matthieu Vaxiviere and Andre Negrao – who along with Lapierre took third place at Le Mans with the A480-badged P1 ORECA in 2021 as well as a pair of WEC victories last year ahead of Toyota – should be regarded as shoo-ins for race seats in the definitive version of the car revealed at Le Mans.

The WEC racer will have lost the ß suffix by the time it makes its debut in Qatar early next March. Its usage on what was a show car at Le Mans follows a norm in the software industry where it signifies a development version of a programme. The name of the car with which Alpine will try to repeat its Le Mans success of 45 years ago won’t be quite so mistakeable for the 1978 winner, but there can be no mistaking Alpine’s intent.

Alpine is looking to build on its successful sportscar history with the A424

Photo by: Joao Filipe / DPPI