Alpine’s factory effort in the World Endurance Championship will not be affected by any potential changes to its Formula 1 engine programme.
Bruno Famin, vice president of motorsport at Alpine, has stated that the Renault brand will continue to build and maintain engines for its A424 LMDh car at Viry-Chatillon in France for the foreseeable future.
Renault’s Viry factory has been building engines for grand prix racing since 1979, but the French manufacturer is debating whether to abandon its F1 power unit programme in time for the new regulations in 2026.
Although a decision is not expected to be made until 30 September as per an internal target set by the company, the prospect of Renault stopping production of F1 engines at Viry to turn Alpine into a Mercedes customer team has not been received well by employees, who have staged multiple protests in recent weeks.
But “whatever happens” to its long-running F1 engine programme, the Viry facility will continue to play an important role in Alpine’s Hypercar team according to Famin.
“We are already using the facility for WEC engines. [In] 2025 we continue with the Formula 1 engine,” he said.
“We are using the facility, the people, the skills, the resources we have in Viry to support and develop the WEC programme for sure and we will continue [doing that in the future].”
The Alpine A424 is powered by a heavily modified version of Mecachrome’s 3.4-litre turbocharged V6 engine that is also used in Formula 2. This is paired with a spec hybrid system that is common to all LMDh cars and is supplied jointly by Bosch, Xtrac, Williams Advanced Engineering.
More testing in 2025
Alpine has completed limited testing on its return to the Hypercar class with the all-new A424 in 2024.
It was the only manufacturer in the category not to take part in a collective test at Austin in July ahead of this month’s Lone Star Le Mans event.
However, Famin has revealed that Alpine will ramp up testing in 2025 in order to use its entire allocation.
“The regulations limit the number of days you can test and the number of days depends if you are a manufacturer, but [also how many] customer [cars you have],” he explained.
“Some competitors have quite a lot of customer cars and they are allowed to make more tests. They also have double programmes with IMSA and WEC.
“We go step by step and the goal for next year will be for sure to make the full use of all the quota in terms of the number of test days that we are gonna have.”
