Why Alpine's WEC exit isn't a body blow but a warning sign

Does it matter that Alpine is quitting the World Endurance Championship? That it will pull the curtain down on its Hypercar adventure at the end of the 2026 season? Not really, at least not to the series. The WEC can weather this. In terms of manufacturer participation, it’s bursting at the seams, and let’s not forget that this time next year, we are going to be bigging up the imminent arrival of Ford and McLaren in the top class.

That’s not to overlook the human cost here. There will be people who will be out of work at Alpine’s racing headquarters at Viry-Chatillon on the outskirts of Paris and two or three hours to the south at the Bourges base of the Signatech team that runs the A424 LMDhs. The employment market for mechanics, engineers and, of course, drivers with experience of Hypercar is buoyant right now, but this move is going to result in upheaval for some.

But the WEC will be just fine. The participation of nine major car makers, the number we expect in 2027, is more than enough. But should the FIA and the Automobile Club de l’Ouest, who jointly run the championship, be worried that there is some kind of trend? That’s a tough one, because the three OEMs to have left the WEC’s Hypercar class so far — Lamborghini, Porsche and Alpine — have all done so for very different reasons.

What you can’t ignore, however, are the challenges faced by the automotive industry right now as it transitions towards net-zero emissions. Like it or lump it, the future of motorsport, from the grassroots up, is going to be impacted by decisions made by legislators and politicians over the years to come. That is going to make for uncertain times in the years ahead.

Lamborghini, never more than a bit player in either the WEC or over in the IMSA SportsCar Championship in North America, paused its SC63 programme with Iron Lynx at the end of 2024 when the rules changed in Hypercar to demand it run two cars. The Italian manufacturer, though part of the Volkswagen group, is a small company and it was faced with having to increase the resources it was putting into its LMDh programme at the same time as it was bringing its new GT3 racer, the Temerario, to the marketplace. Building GT3s and Super Trofeo one-make racers is the core activity of the in-house Squadra Corse motorsport department at Sant’Agata Bolognese, remember.

Alpine, also small fry in comparison to the majority of the OEMs competing in Hypercar, cited the aforementioned challenges on the announcement of its decision to leave the WEC on Thursday. It pointed to the slower than expected growth of the electric vehicle market in the statement on its withdrawal.

Alpine celebrated victory most recently at last year's Fuji 6 Hours

Photo by: FIAWEC - DPPI

The plan within parent company Renault calls for Alpine to be a manufacturer of electric vehicles only. That should be the case from later this year when the A110, a modern take on the car of the same name from the 1960s and '70s with which the brand was relaunched, goes out of production.

It probably didn’t help that there was a change at the top of Renault last year when Luca de Meo, the man responsible for bringing in Flavio Briatore as his advisor and de facto boss of the Formula 1 team, resigned. His replacement, Francois Provost, is believed to have little appetite for motorsport. It appears not to have mattered that Alpine was a race winner in the WEC last year.

What’s happening in the car market played a part in Porsche’s withdrawal. It needed to make cutbacks in the face of falling sales, and motorsport was required to do its bit. One of its factory programmes had to go. Formula E was probably always safe and the axe fell on the WEC rather than IMSA. The reasons for the choice are more worrying than its actual withdrawal, or those of Alpine and Lamborghini.

Manufacturers don’t hang around forever in any particular discipline of motorsport, even in the good times. Sportscar racing, from the highest level down, needs the indies

Porsche cited sporting considerations in the decision and reckoned that it should have won the Le Mans 24 Hours last year with the best of the Penske-run factory 963 LMDhs. Marque motorsport boss Thomas Laudenbach was keen to point out that the car had a near-perfect run but still trailed the winning Ferrari 499P Le Mans Hypercar that didn’t. The term Balance of Performance wasn’t mentioned, of course, but the inference has to be that Porsche believed that the organisers got their calculations wrong.

The subtext behind Porsche’s withdrawal means it has much greater significance than Alpine deciding to pull the plug. That’s before you factor in the German marque’s rich history in sportscar racing. Alpine has one outright win at Le Mans; Porsche has 19 of them. It is the most storied of all manufacturers participating in endurance racing. Sorry Ferrari!

Porsche will be absent from Hypercar entirely next year: there will be no privateer 963s on the grid. The company always made great play of its decision to offer LMDh to customers, and from the get-go in year one of the programme. Yet this year there will be just one competing worldwide, the JDC/Miller MotorSports entry in IMSA’s GTP class. We’ve also seen the disappearance of the garagistes, Glickenhaus, Isotta Fraschini and ByKolles with its Vanwall.

Alpine join Porsche and Lamborghini as manufacturers to exit WEC's Hypercar era - along with many garagistes

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

That is as big a worry to my mind as the series of pull-outs by factory players. Sportscar racing has traditionally relied on independents, whether they build their own cars or buy something off the shelf. The ACO has talked about their importance regularly down the years, though in the recent past with manufacturers flooding into Hypercar, the topic seems to have dropped of its agenda.

Manufacturers don’t hang around forever in any particular discipline of motorsport, even in the good times. Sportscar racing, from the highest level down, needs the indies. Over the years some have simply made up the numbers, but others have taken the fight to factories.

I’m not just thinking of Joest Racing here and its victories over the Porsche factory at Le Mans in 1985 with the Group C 956 and again in 1997 with the WSC96 LMP. (The factory was absent in '84 when Joest’s NewMan 956 triumphed at the 24 Hours for the first time and its first victory with the WSC95 was a pseudo-factory effort.) Jota showed what was possible in the present era with the 963 in 2023 and '24. The modern world of sportscar racing, with the BoP and technical rules that limit development, should had made it easier for privateers to compete and encouraged them through the door.

One day there might not be eight or nine manufacturers in Hypercar. How many would the ACO and the FIA be happy with? Five, six or perhaps just four? The WEC is a two-class championship these days after LMP2 was banished from the grid, with the exception of Le Mans, to make way for the influx of manufacturers. The series would definitely need the privateers if more manufacturers decided to follow Lamborghini, Porsche and Alpine the other way through the door.

I’m going to be sad to see Alpine disappear from the WEC after three seasons with the A424 and 11 since it joined the series full-time in P2 in 2015. I loved that it was trying to reprise its victory at Le Mans in 1978, the first year, as a new Autosport reader, I paid proper attention to the big race. But I’m sadder still to see the end of motorsport operations at Viry-Chatillon. The home of the A424 project has a long history in our sport but is now transitioning into something called Alpine Tech to focus on innovation within the Renault group.

Viry became Gordini’s base shortly after it was merged into Renault in 1968. A builder of sportscars that had long since acted as a special tuner for its future owner developed the V6 engine with which Renault introduced turbocharged technology into F1 in 1977.

The shuttering of Viry's motorsport activities is a sad conclusion to a rich history

Photo by: Sutton Images

It subsequently merged with Alpine’s competition department to become Renault Sport to mastermind the F1 programme, though only after Le Mans '78: the team that triumphed at the French enduro with the Alpine-Renault A442B driven by Didier Pironi and Jean-Pierre Jaussaud was run from Alpine’s factory in Boulogne. By my reckoning, in the years since the Renault RS01 turned up at the British Grand Prix in 1977 there have been only two seasons, 1987 and '88, when there wasn’t an engine developed at Viry on the F1 grid, even if Renault wasn’t always written on the cam covers.

The decision to axe the F1 engine programme in favour of a switch to Mercedes customer powertrains from 2026 was one of Briatore’s first acts on taking the reins at Alpine. Now the marque’s LMDh programme is coming to an end. It’s disappointing, but hardly a body blow for the WEC.

The Alpine brand will get one more shot at adding to its 1978 Le Mans 24 Hours win in June before its LMDh programme ends

Photo by: Motorsport Images