SPA, Belgium — Alpine Formula One team principal Bruno Famin will leave his role to focus on the brand’s wider motorsport activities, including a planned end of its factory engine program by 2026.
Famin, 62, took over the day-to-day running of Alpine’s F1 activities at last year’s Belgian Grand Prix in July following the departure of former team principal Otmar Szafnauer.
At the same race 12 months later, following Alpine’s disastrous start to the 2024 season and their decline in the F1 standings, Famin has announced he will step down from his role at the end of August.
Alpine said that a new team principal would be “announced in due course.” One name that has been heavily linked to the role is Oliver Oakes, who owns and runs the Hitech GP team that races in Formula Two and Formula Three, and previously bid to join the F1 grid.
Famin said the move was so he could focus on his role as Alpine’s vice president of motorsport, overseeing all of its motorsport activities, including its Le Mans Hypercar program and aspirations to compete in the Dakar Rally.
“I think it will be clearer on that side, if I step down from the team principal role of Alpine F1, and be fully dedicated to the Viry-Chatillon activities from September 1,” Famin said in a news conference on Friday.
Famin’s decision comes ahead of the Belgian Grand Prix (Rudy Carezzevoli/Getty Images)
Famin also confirmed that a proposal had been put forward to staff and management at the team to stop making F1 engines and become a customer from 2026.
Renault, the parent group of Alpine, began producing F1 engines in the 1970s and secured titles with Williams, Benetton, and Red Bull, as well as with its own team in 2005 and 2006. It has struggled, however, to compete with the other suppliers for performance under the current engine regulations that started in 2014.
It emerged in recent weeks that Alpine were exploring options to potentially become a customer team, holding talks with Mercedes about a deal.
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Famin confirmed in a news conference that a plan had been submitted to “reallocate the resources” from the engine program to Alpine’s wider brand technologies, and that it would look to “buy a power unit” from an existing manufacturer.
He made clear that no deal had yet been signed and said he was unable to give a timeline as Alpine was still in discussions with various government and trade union bodies in France, following a “very strict” process.
Alpine is currently split between two sites, running the racing team out of Enstone, Oxfordshire, in the UK while making its engines in Viry, France.
Famin said there would be no redundancies and that every single employee in Viry would be offered a job.
Another change at the top of Alpine
Famin’s exit marks yet another change at the top of Alpine, which is now set to move on to its four-team principal in the last four years.
Whoever takes over from Famin will follow Szafnauer and Cyril Abiteboul, who was team principal at Enstone until the end of 2020 ahead of the Alpine rebrand.
The departure comes as part of wider-reaching changes in the senior leadership at Alpine through this year. Last month, Flavio Briatore — the former F1 chief once banned for life for fixing the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix — returned as an executive advisor, while the team has overhauled its car design group this year.
The Renault factory team has regularly gone through different eras of change, promising transformation after transformation to help lift its fortunes and become an F1 frontrunner again.
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But they have not won a championship since Fernando Alonso’s last title in 2006 and have only achieved one race victory in the past decade, thanks to Esteban Ocon at Hungary in 2021.
From 2026, F1 will introduce a new generation of power units. A number of teams believe that designing their own power units to perfectly integrate with the overhauled car designs will provide a significant on-track advantage.
But Famin rejected the suggestion that this was a sign the Renault Group was no longer prioritizing the success of its F1 team, saying it remained “a key project for the Alpine brands.”
“It’s thanks to Formula One that we want to develop the brand awareness globally, that remains,” Famin added.
“But the projects, it’s just reallocating the resources to develop the brand better, always based on the pillar of motorsport and mainly Formula One to develop the awareness.”
(Bryn Lennon/Getty Images)
