Strike! Alpine F1 staff protest against plans to axe its engine

Well this doesn’t happen very often… a group of Alpine F1 staff is reportedly going on strike today in protest over plans to kill off its programme in favour of, um, buying engines from Mercedes instead.

Workers at Alpine’s engine HQ at Viry-Chatillon are set to down tools for a number of hours, while a protest is planned in the grandstands at Monza ahead of the Italian Grand Prix this weekend.

Staff in the garage might also wear black armbands in solidarity, but the team’s race operations shouldn’t be impacted in any way.

Alpine has insisted that ending its engine programme - which began life almost half a century ago and is the second-most successful in F1 history with 12 constructors’ titles - is just an idea at this stage, and that a final decision on its future hasn’t been taken.

But the signs aren’t promising: it’s widely accepted that Renault’s engine is the weakest on the grid, having fallen behind those of Mercedes, Ferrari and even Honda, which overcame woeful reliability at the start of the turbo-hybrid era to power Max Verstappen to his maiden title in 2021.

A new generation of engine regs with even more hybrid power will be implemented in 2026, and it’s thought that Renault Group boss Luca de Meo has been convinced that the team’s best shot at glory is as a customer team.

Historically customer teams have never prevailed over their suppliers in F1, but McLaren buys its power units from Mercedes… and just look how the constructors' championship is shaping up at the moment. Yeah.

Not having to design, develop and build a bunch of very expensive engines would also save quite a bit of cash. And who wants to spend hundreds of millions of dollars just to finish second (or worse)?

Watch this space.