ALPINE’S ‘RENAULUTION’
There’s more to the rebranding of Renault’s F1 team than just a corporate marketing exercise...
LAZARUS, THE REPAIR SHOP AND SPARTACUS ROLLED INTO ONE FIVE YEAR PROJECT
Renault Group’s F1 team heads into a season hoping that it will mark the dawn of a new era, one in which the sun lies just over the horizon.
Not for the first time the company has spoken of a ‘transitional year’ – the catch-all excuse for a team which knows that genuine success remains beyond its grasp.
The last six months have been turbulent, but from this Renault has emerged with a plan; one based on new faces, a new structure and a full rebranding as Alpine F1.
Laurent Rossi becomes CEO of the newly minted Alpine business unit, with Suzuki’s world championship-winning Motogp boss Davide Brivio appointed as Race Director of Alpine F1. Out has gone Jérôme Stoll, President of Renault Sport, and F1 team principal Cyril Abiteboul.
The former was expected, Stoll reaching the end of a five-year term; the latter came as a shock. When an executive leaves a business ‘with immediate effect’ it usually means someone wasn’t happy. Toys may have been thrown…
There had been a story circulating to the effect that Abiteboul was heading for higher office, in the role now held by Rossi, but it’s clear that Renault Group’s CEO Luca de Meo wanted to shake the tree rather harder. In the reshuffle that followed Abiteboul – famed for his pugnacious relationship with Christian Horner during the Red Bull-renault years – elected to bail.
Last September’s announcement that the Alpine brand would become the focus of Renault Group’s sporting ambitions had already raised a few eyebrows. Many wondered aloud whether the little sportscar company based in Dieppe, France, could really shoulder the burden of Renault’s F1 programme.
Putting aside the accolades which have flooded in thanks to the success of Alpine’s evocative
A110 sportscar, with retro styling and allaluminium construction, could Renault justify an F1 programme based on a mid-range two-seater which sold just 4376 units in 2019? The answer lies not in the past but in the future.
In January de Meo outlined his vision in a live-streamed presentation lasting almost three hours. The first thing we were introduced to was the rather clunky portmanteau being used to describe the new strategy: ‘Renaulution’.
Painful to say, harder to write, the strategy as outlined by de Meo has three phases comprising Resurrection (2020-23), Renovation (2023-25) and Revolution (2025+). Lazarus, The Repair Shop and Spartacus rolled into one five-year project.
So far, so corporate.
The detail behind the presentation was clearer, as de Meo outlined a shift in focus across the Renault Group, “from volume to value.” Sales volume had been the primary strategy of his predecessor, Carlos Ghosn, whose arrest in Japan in November 2018 triggered a crisis for Renault and its alliance with Nissan. Ultimately it fell to interim CEO Clotilde Delbos to stabilise the ship prior to de Meo’s recruitment from Volkswagen, where he ran SEAT.
In focusing on value, for which read ‘profit’, de Meo is playing to his strengths as a heavyweight automotive industry professional. Said to have been a one-time protégé of the late Sergio Marchionne, de Meo journeyed through the ranks of FIAT, taking responsibility for the Italian company’s cherished brands along the way – Lancia, Alfa Romeo and Fiat.
It was while at Fiat that de Meo first came into contact with Davide Brivio, who was at that time director of Yamaha’s Moto GP team. In a break with tradition, Fiat joined with Yamaha
from 2007-2010, becoming the first non-tobacco sponsor of a Motogp team in the four-stroke era.
It was Brivio, known for his organisational and management skills, who made a fateful trip to Ibiza in 2003 to convince Valentino Rossi to abandon Honda in favour of Yamaha
– a company that had gone 12 years without achieving title-winning success.
The rest is history but, in case you don’t follow Motogp, let us pause to reflect on the success Brivio and Yamaha boss Lin Jarvis achieved with their new recruit. Rossi won his very first race for the team in 2004 before going on to take the first of four world titles, winning 46 races for Yamaha during a seven-year phase. In 2011 he departed for Ducati and Fiat ended their sponsorship.
Brivio left too, initially continuing to work closely with Rossi, but ultimately decided to return to the fray when head-hunted by Suzuki in
April 2013. He masterminded Suzuki’s return to Motogp the following year, culminating in last season’s famous victory in both the teams’ and riders’ championships.
The relationship between de Meo and Brivio is important.
De Meo has determined that Alpine will become the focus of Renault’s sporting ambitions – spearheaded by
F1 – and he wants a proven winner to help drive the results. Having joined Renault shortly after F1’s teams agreed the budget cap, de Meo signed off on the company’s commitment to the new Concorde Agreement and then set about the integration of the Alpine, Renault Sport and F1 operations.
It’s a central pillar of his vision. De Meo understands the marketing potential of F1 and is interested in exploring the technology transfer to Alpine road cars – particularly in terms of connectivity and energy management. He knows that on-track success is a prerequisite.
The budget cap and 2022 regulations should help Alpine edge towards that goal, but as we have seen previously the theory is often quite different from reality. Mercedes, Red Bull, Aston Martin and Ferrari are not exactly twiddling their thumbs in preparation for next season.
De Meo knows this, and it’s clear he sees the challenge of F1 as reflecting Renault’s wider issues. In his January presentation he used an F1 analogy to describe the Group: “It’s [been] like a car growing in size and weight, becoming too heavy for the output of the engine, and this becoming very obvious when the latest grands prix are raced on more and more twisty circuits.”
The Alpine brand has become the beneficiary of his drive to shed excess weight and make the Renault Group more agile.
Laurent Rossi has announced that Alpine’s future is all-electric, a partnership with Lotus focusing on producing a lightweight, electric sportscar, with further plans including a hot hatch and a crossover SUV.
Quite how the all-electric future for Alpine squares with F1’s continued embrace of the internal combustion engine only time will tell. A much larger energy storage system is likely when F1 introduces new engine regulations in 2025, but whether Alpine will feel that is enough is perhaps less important than what happens in terms of results on and off track.
In this regard, de Meo and Rossi are united. By 2025 the Alpine division has to be profitable from all its operations, F1 included. To achieve that, the team will unquestionably need to meet its targets. This means building a competitive car within the budget cap and unlocking the performance necessary to produce sufficient prize money and sponsorship.
In the meantime, Rossi’s support for the F1 programme is steadfast.
“By now there should no doubt that racing in general, and F1 in particular, will remain at the heart of our brand,” he says. “We have renewed our full F1 commitment and will enter the new regulations era in 2022 with the objective of consistently competing for podiums. 2021 will be a transition for us, like all the teams.”
All the teams except those winning races…
Given the timelines for the ‘Resurrection’ phase of de Meo’s strategy, Alpine will need to deliver podiums in 2022 or 2023 at the latest. This is no easy task. Even the incoming Fernando Alonso acknowledges how difficult it will be to grab a podium despite Daniel Ricciardo and Esteban Ocon managing this feat in 2020.
Since returning as a team owner in 2016, Renault has finished ninth, sixth, fourth, fifth and fifth in the constructors’ championship, with 2020 podiums at the Nürburgring, Imola and Bahrain the high points. Most noticeably, the team has yet to beat its leading customer teams, initially Red Bull and more recently Mclaren.
That the newly calibrated Alpine division enters 2021 without a single F1 engine customer will undoubtedly have been another recent discussion point. There was a time, not too many seasons back, when customer programmes were an essential part of Renault’s game plan.
These challenges aside, Brivio’s appointment shows how serious de Meo is about doing whatever it takes to make Alpine F1 work. Even if his appointment sent ripples through Enstone.
Abiteboul’s departure means that Marcin Budkowski, the man who controversially joined the team from the FIA as executive director in April 2018, will now need to form a strong partnership with the incoming race director.
There has been much discussion about how this can work, but given that Budkowski is an engineer – an aerodynamicist to be exact – and that Brivio isn’t, a clear division of roles and responsibilities should be possible. A Horner/ Adrian Newey approach might not go far wrong.
For his part, Brivio spoke during his final months with Suzuki about the things that motivate him, and where he feels he can bring value to a team. Specifically, he spoke about his experience working with Valentino Rossi and gaining an understanding of the importance of having a winning mindset which cascades through the team.
“One thing is to race to participate and to try to do your best,” he told the Motogp podcast, “[Another] thing is to race with the target to win the title. When you go for winning the title, everything has to be perfect.”
Brivio’s success in winning Motogp with Suzuki last year clearly resonated with de Meo, and the task facing him at Alpine F1 is similar
– even if the team is not starting from scratch. “[When] Suzuki called to say that they wanted to come back to Motogp and for me to reorganise the team, I liked very much this job,” recalls Brivio. He relishes a challenge, to help a team make the journey from participant to competitor.
Working with Alonso is unlikely to faze him.
GIVEN THE TIMELINES, ALPINE WILL NEED TO DELIVER PODIUMS IN 2022 OR 2023 AT THE LATEST
At 56 Brivio has been around the racing block a few times, most obviously having successfully worked with superstar Valentino Rossi and more recently with Suzuki’s Spanish line-up of 2020 champion Joan Mir and team-mate Alex Rins.
Brivio will also know Alonso’s speed and experience will be important in helping the team understand its weaknesses, picking up where Ricciardo left off. Ocon’s role will be to provide comparative data and prove his worth alongside a team-mate who is as tough as they come.
One major difference for Brivio, of course, is that whereas the rider can make a big difference to performance on two wheels, the driver bolted into the cockpit of an F1 car has a lot less influence over ultimate performance.
The balance between talent and technology is a different equation.
The much larger, complex operations of Alpine F1 will also take some getting used to, but for a capable people’s-person like Brivio the focus on building team cohesion, trust and focus will be the same whether it’s for 45 people in a Motogp outfit or 900 at Enstone.
Perhaps Brivio’s greatest challenge will be in making the Alpine-renault Group relationship work. It was his ability to get what was needed from the Yamaha and Suzuki bosses in Japan that helped ensure his Motogp teams had the resources to win. It’s something he is proud to have achieved, balancing the urgent needs of a race team against the wider demands of its corporate parents.
If he can help deliver that at Alpine, we might even agree it’s a Renaulution worth the name.