Alpine Formula One is the sporting subsidiary arm for the French car maker Renault and Alpine has been around since 1955. They rebranded the Renault Formula One team to Alpine Formula One Team back in 2021 and must have had a good reason for this.
Today Alpine Formula One announced that next year will be the last year of producing the power units for the team and will outsource engine production thereafter. This makes financial sense considering they only supply themselves so they have limited data compared to the likes of Mercedes who supply 4 other teams. The rumors are from 2026 they will also be using a Mercedes engine. This is not a great announcement for the sport of Formula One having one less engine supplier which will see only see 3 main suppliers and 4 if you count Red Bull having taken over what was then the old Honda engines.
The move is what other car manufacturers have been doing already for many years and they will create a new technological state of the art facility called Hypertech Alpine. This facility will look at developing new technology and head hunting those at the the top of their game if they don't have those engineers with the expertise they require.
Alpine Renault has done some work with creating their own hyper car using hydrogen which launched earlier this year and now they would like to move to electric vehicles. Building and creating formula one engines is not cheap and the results have been not that great so outsourcing this will most likely save them loads of money and also at the same time improve performance.
Honda many yeas ago pulled out of supplying Red Bull due to not being able to justify the spend when the rest of the car market was heading towards electric vehicles. After many years thy are returning as the engine supplier for Aston Martin, but could end up being a great business move supplying all future Aston martins with Honda engines plus batteries for the EV range.
For a car manufacturer staying in Formula One is imperative for what it offers. A team like Mercedes has developed through innovation so many crossovers into their road cars that they are considered far more than just a racing team.
Passenger safety cells replacing steel with carbon fiber is an easy example where technology ha crossed over. Traction control, correct tire pressures driven via years of data, energy recovery when heat energy was never being used and now is through KERS or kinetic energy recovery systems. 7 years go this was only achieving a 39% energy saving ad is now in the 90% range. Energy recovery systems will be even more important with electric vehicles as this technology is what is going to increase the range of the vehicle.
All of this is what adds value to a particular vehicle which would not have bee developed without the need in Formula One. The sport is data driven and this data is seriously valuable information which is then shared and applied to road cars. This may not seem that obvious, but there is heaps of crossovers and there will be even more when it comes to EV's.
Renault and their Hypertech division have a lot of catching up to do as we know the car market is changing with many new players involved today. The only way the old established firms can compete is by offering an affordable vehicle with all the high tech they can develop outdoing the other competitors. We have already seen the likes of giant car manufacturers like Volkswagen under pressure due to Chinese EV imports. EV cars for some reason are not cheap and the old school charging crazy prices will not end well.