Alpine's Flavio Briatore says moving to Mercedes customer units was his only condition for joining the Renault-owned Formula 1 team, contradicting earlier comments that he had nothing to do with the swap.
Alpine abandoned its in-house F1's power unit programme in Viry-Chatillon to become a Mercedes customer, saving the parent company a significant amount of money while also giving it better chances of a competitive power unit for the 2026 rules era after years of lagging behind F1's leading constructors. As part of the deal Alpine is also taking Mercedes gearboxes rather than producing its own.
Renault's decision to move Viry's focus away from F1 to other projects, a decision made by former Renault CEO Luca de Meo over the second half of 2024, was a controversial one at the time, with Viry employees staging protests against the decision.
Briatore has now said moving to the known quantity of Mercedes customer engines was the one condition he set when De Meo asked him to become a team advisor, despite claiming at the time he was "not the bad guy" and not involved in the decision.
"The moment when Luca de Meo was talking about joining the team, [there was] only one condition for me to join the team, which was to have a Mercedes-Benz engine. There was no plan B, it was only one plan," Briatore said as Alpine launched its 2026 challenger in Barcelona on Friday.
"I wanted a Mercedes-Benz engine completely. There was only one way to come back, because in this moment, you need to be with the best people. And the people of Mercedes, we started working together and it was promising. It's surprising, the ways that the people [at Mercedes] are collaborating with us. It's a super, super relationship. This is what we're looking for. I wanted to have the discussion with the best. With the second best, no interest."
While it is not yet clear how 2026's power units will stack up, Alpine having the same engines as the likes of Mercedes and McLaren means the team has "no excuses" to hide behind from now on, according to Briatore. Its power unit deficit was one key reason why Alpine abandoned its 2025 aerodynamic development early on and accepted to write off the season in 10th place. Its early focus on 2026 has also given the team confidence it will be much more competitive.
"If we had kept going with the 2025 car development, maybe we hadn't finished in P10 but P9," Briatore explained.
"At every race, I asked [how much our deficit would be]. This race? Four tenths. This race? 3.5 tenths, This race? Five tenths. And last year in three tenths we had 14 cars, so instead to start improving the 2025 car, the engine will be the same engine anyway, just forget it. And we stopped the development of 2025 and we put everything in 2026.
"At least when I arrive to the race, I will not ask anymore how many tenths we have in disadvantage. Nobody is talking about engine anymore. Nobody is talking about gearbox anymore. At least we have two issues we don't need to care about."
