Alpine’s factory operations within the World Endurance Championship is not going to be disrupted by any potential changes to the Formula 1 engine programme.
Bruno Famin, Vice President of Motorsport at Alpine, has announced that Renault will proceed to provide and maintain engines for the A424 LMDh in Viry-Chatillon, France, for the foreseeable future.
Renault's Viry plant has been producing Grand Prix engines since 1979, however the French manufacturer is now considering abandoning its Formula 1 engine programme ahead of the introduction of recent regulations in 2026.
While a choice shouldn’t be resulting from be made before September 30, consistent with internal targets set by the corporate, the prospect of Renault ceasing production of Formula One engines at Viry and turning Alpine right into a Mercedes customer team has not gone down well with employees, who’ve staged plenty of protests in recent weeks.
However, “regardless of what happens” to the long-standing Formula 1 engine programme, the Viry plant will proceed to play a very important role within the Alpine Hypercar team, in line with Famin.
“We are already using this facility to test WEC engines. [In] In 2025 we will continue working on a Formula 1 engine,” he said.
“We are actually using the facilities, people, skills and resources we have now at Viry to support and develop the WEC programme and we are going to proceed to accomplish that [doing that in the future].”
The Alpine A424 is powered by a heavily modified version of Mecachrome's 3.4-litre turbocharged V6 engine, which can also be utilized in Formula 2. This engine is coupled to a special hybrid system that’s common to all LMDh cars and is supplied jointly by Bosch, Xtrac and Williams Advanced Engineering.
#35 Alpine A424 Endurance Team: Paul-Loup Chatin, Ferdinand Habsburg-Lothringen, Charles Milesi
Photo: JEP / Motorsport Images
More testing in 2025
Alpine has accomplished limited testing ahead of its return to the Hypercar class in 2024 with the disclosing of the all-new A424.
It was the one manufacturer within the category not to participate within the collective test in Austin in July ahead of this 12 months's Lone Star Le Mans event.
However, Famin revealed that Alpine intends to accentuate testing in 2025 as a way to use up the total allocation.
The regulations limit the variety of days you may run tests, and the number is dependent upon whether you’re a manufacturer, but [also how many] Client [cars you have]”- he explained.
“Some competitors have quite just a few customer cars and might do more testing. They even have dual programs with IMSA and WEC.
“We are taking it step by step and the goal for next year will definitely be to fully utilize all the quotas in terms of the number of test days that we will have.”
