There's a factory in Oxfordshire that has housed four Formula 1 drivers' championships. Michael Schumacher won two of them there. Fernando Alonso won the other two. The trophies are still in the building. None of them belong to the team that occupies it now — at least not under the name it currently uses.
That team is Alpine. The name arrived in 2021, when Renault decided its sports car brand belonged on the side of the car rather than its own badge. Five seasons on, the more interesting question isn't where Alpine finishes. It's what Alpine is actually for.
A name borrowed from the showroom
Renault has come and gone from Formula 1 more than once, and its identity always depended on the mood of the boardroom. Sometimes the team was a works project with a serious engineering mission. Sometimes it was a marketing vehicle. The switch to Alpine was the second kind, dressed up as the first.
The logic made commercial sense. Renault's road car business was pivoting hard toward electric vehicles, and the Alpine badge — a small French maker of lightweight sports cars, revived in 2017 with the A110 — was being repositioned as the group's performance brand. Putting that name in Formula 1 gave it a global stage at a fraction of the cost of building the brand from scratch.
But here's the thing that brand-led teams keep rediscovering: heritage is not transferable. The A110's reputation for lightness and driver feel doesn't make the F1 car faster. And the people in Enstone who had spent decades building race cars under the Benetton and Renault names suddenly had to explain to sponsors that the new badge wasn't a new team.
It wasn't, and that mattered. The Enstone operation has been one of the most successful in the sport's modern history. It won with Schumacher in 1994 and 1995, then again with Alonso in 2005 and 2006. A name change doesn't erase that. But it does make it harder to remember, which is a strange thing to do to your own reputation.
The decision that told you everything
If you want to understand where Alpine sits in the hierarchy, look at the engines.
For most of Renault's modern F1 history, the Viry-Châtillon factory outside Paris built the power units. That was the point of being a manufacturer team — you controlled your own destiny, you took the credit when it worked, and you took the blame when it didn't. Between 2014 and 2018, the blame was substantial. The Renault power unit fell behind its rivals badly enough that Red Bull, its own customer, spent years publicly complaining about it.
By the time the 2026 regulations were being finalised — new engines, roughly a 50/50 split between combustion and electrical power, a much bigger role for battery deployment — Renault had a decision to make. Building a competitive power unit for the new rules meant a significant, multi-year investment with no guarantee of return. Renault Group chose not to make it. From 2026, Alpine will run Mercedes engines.
Read that again, because it's the single most consequential thing that has happened to this team since the rebrand. The operation that once defined Renault's F1 identity has become a customer. Viry-Châtillon is being redirected toward other motorsport programmes — Alpine races in the World Endurance Championship and in Formula E as well — and toward electrification work that has nothing to do with a Sunday afternoon.
There's a defensible argument for this. Being a customer team is not a life sentence. McLaren won the constructors' championship in 2024 running Mercedes power. Red Bull spent its formative years as a customer before becoming a constructor in its own right. If Alpine can buy a competitive engine and put its money into the chassis, aerodynamics and operations instead, that's a rational allocation of resources.
But rational allocations of resources have never been the problem at Enstone. Knowing what to do with them has.
Change has become the habit
Since the Alpine name arrived, count the leadership churn. A team principal who came from within Renault's road car division and left. A team principal recruited from a rival with a mandate to modernise, gone within eighteen months. An interim replacement. A new arrival from the junior categories. Then a return of one of the sport's most recognisable figures to a front-line role, with the structure reshaped around him.
Each change came with a plausible explanation. Some of them were genuinely necessary. But the pattern is the pattern: a team that reorganises faster than it improves. In Formula 1, organisational stability is worth lap time. Every time a technical director leaves, a car's development gets delayed by a month. Every time the hierarchy is redrawn, a dozen engineers spend a fortnight wondering who they now report to.
The driver situation told the same story. The all-French pairing of Pierre Gasly and Esteban Ocon was, on paper, a marketing gift — two drivers from the same country, both with something to prove, both tied to the brand's national identity. In practice, it meant managing a rivalry that went back to their karting days, with two competitive drivers who had never been friends. Alpine did it, and then undid it a year later. Meanwhile the team's most valuable asset of the last decade — Oscar Piastri, who won Formula 2 in Alpine colours — walked out the door and is now a race winner elsewhere. That one still stings, and it should.
What's actually working
It would be unfair to write Alpine off as a cautionary tale with a nice livery. There are real things here.
The 2021 Hungarian Grand Prix gave the team its first win under the new name, in genuinely chaotic circumstances that Ocon handled better than anyone. In 2024, at a soaked Interlagos, both cars ended up on the podium in the same race — the team's best result of the modern era, and enough to lift it several places in the constructors' standings. The common thread in both results is worth noticing: they came in the wet, in races where judgement and nerve mattered more than raw car performance. That's not luck. That's a team that can execute when the conditions force everyone to think.
The infrastructure also improved. Enstone has had significant investment in facilities and personnel. The talent pipeline is real — the academy keeps producing drivers who find seats somewhere in the paddock, even if not always at Alpine. And the commercial side, with a stake held by a consortium of outside investors including a Hollywood production company, gave the team access to a kind of mainstream visibility that most midfield outfits never get.
The difficulty is that none of this compounds while the leadership keeps turning over.
What to watch
2026 is genuinely a fork in the road, and not just because of the regulations. New engines mean everyone's performance baseline resets. A customer Mercedes power unit that's competitive on day one, combined with a chassis that's actually sorted, could put Alpine in a position to capitalise quickly. That's the optimistic case, and it's not fantasy.
The pessimistic case is the more familiar one: the new rules catch the team out, the development race accelerates, the pressure from Renault Group's boardroom intensifies, and the whole thing starts over again. There have been persistent reports for a while that the parent company might reconsider its ownership stake. Nothing has come of them, but the fact that they keep circulating tells you how the team is perceived inside its own building.
For a general viewer, Alpine is easy to ignore — a midfield team with a pretty car and a complicated backstory. But it's one of the more revealing stories in the paddock right now, because it asks a question that applies far beyond motorsport: what happens when a famous name gets attached to an organisation that hasn't decided what it wants to be?
The trophies in Enstone belong to the building. They don't belong to the badge. Someone eventually has to decide whether Alpine is a racing team with a car brand, or a car brand with a racing team. Five seasons in, that decision still hasn't been made.