Alpine’s new challenge with ‘old’ machinery

An emotive name is back at the sharp end of the Le Mans 24 Hours grid this year. Renault’s Alpine marque has moved up from LMP2 with the French Signatech squad to the forefront of sportscar racing more than 40 years after claiming victory at the French enduro with Didier Pironi and Jean-pierre Jaussaud aboard the bubble-cockpit A442B. The 1978 triumph at Le Mans was the culmination of a big-budget assault that had started three years before. Its attempt to repeat that victory is much more low-key.

Alpine has returned with what is, for now, a one-off campaign with an old non-hybrid privateer LMP1 car: the Gibson-powered ORECA design that raced in the previous two editions of the WEC as the Rebellion R-13. The car, now known as the Alpine A480, has been ‘grandfathered’ to race alongside the new breed of Le Mans Hypercars, which means it has been slowed with a decrease in engine power and an increase in weight. And therein lies the big chance for the car. An alreadyproven machine will be going slower than in the past, even if the additional weight could take a toll. Reliability should be the strong suit of a car matched against the brand-new LMH contenders from Toyota and Glickenhaus.

The task for Alpine, reckons Nicolas Lapierre, who shares the Alpine with Matthieu Vaxiviere and Andre Negrao, is to keep pre-race favourite Toyota honest. “We are confident we are going to be reliable, though a question mark is the extra weight, so we should have a shot,” says the Frenchman, who has returned to the Alpine fold for this season after a year away from the marque with which he won the P2 WEC title in 2016 and 2018-19. “We are going to be a little bit behind them in terms of pace, but hopefully we can keep contact and be there if the other cars have problems. That’s our chance.”

There’s a second question mark heading into Le Mans. The A480 was unable to match the stint length of the LMH machinery on the way to podium finishes in each of the first three 2021 WEC rounds because it couldn’t accommodate the full amount of energy or fuel allocated to it under the Balance of Performance, since it was hastily conceived around an LMP2 monocoque at the back end of 2017. Its 75-litre capacity compares with the 90 litres of the Toyota. The initial BOP for Le Mans has now reduced the amount of fuel afforded to the car, which means it can’t match the stints from Toyota and Glickenhaus.

The energy allocations in LMH are based on cars doing 12 laps around the 8.47-mile track. The Alpine won’t achieve more than 11. That means it is likely to make two or three extra stops. “The fuel range is a big thing,” Lapierre says. “It makes us feel we are going into the race with one arm tied behind our backs.”