'Back to old Benetton' — can Alpine avoid mediocre history repeating?

F1

'Team Enstone' has a history of being largely good – but not quite good enough. Will 2023 see it push on or settle for 'best of the rest'?

2 2023 Alpine F1 driver Esteban Ocon at Bahrain pre-season test

Alpine was best of the rest by the end of 2022 – but does it have the ambition to go further?

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“It was back to old Benetton: perfectly respectable, but that’s not why you are in it. Having tasted success it made it even worse.” That’s how Pat Symonds recalls the immediate post-Michael Schumacher era at the team now known as Alpine. After the gold rush, mining for the odd bit of sparkle became something of a slog.

As Benetton, ‘Team Enstone’ – or more accurately ‘Team Witney’ before the end of 1992 –had evolved out of Toleman and struggled for years to rise above mediocrity. It wasn’t bad. It just wasn’t that great. Oscillating between the third and fourth best team through the late 1980s and into the 1990s, Benetton finally came good under Ross Brawn’s leadership when Schumacher rose to grab a pair of world titles, with the team adding the 1995 constructors’ crown for good measure. Then Schumacher left for Ferrari, as did Brawn and eventually Rory Byrne, leaving Benetton to sag back into mere contender territory with the largely disappointing pairing of Jean Alesi and Gerhard Berger.

The cycle was repeated after Renault bought out Benetton in 2000. Investment and a recruitment drive led to those halcyon double title years of 2005-06, built around new talisman Fernando Alonso. But like Schumacher, he left the year after securing his second crown, and ‘Team Enstone’ sagged once more. Yes, there was a mini revival in the brief Kimi Räikkönen Lotus era. But the reality is apart from those two periods of genuine glory, this team has tended to fall into territory best described as … well, underwhelming.

Michael Schumacher’s 1994 in his Ford Benetton

Questions remain whether latest Enstone guise is more Schumacher-era or Berger and Alesi-esque

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That familiar sense hangs again over what is officially right now the fourth best team in Formula 1, as we look ahead to the Bahrain Grand Prix season opener. Yes, the East London launch was glitzy – in the best traditions of the old Benetton days and unique by today’s muted standards – but the three-day test at the Sakhir circuit that ended on Saturday left little to get the juices flowing. The timesheets can’t be trusted, of course. But it was the 353 laps completed that stuck out for me, because it was a mileage only better than troubled 2022 ‘best of the rest’ rival McLaren. So should alarm bells be ringing in Enstone?

Not according to the team. Then again, the expectations as set out by its chief Otmar Szafnauer are so uninspiring it’s hard to care either way. Szafnauer is a sensible chap who wants to protect his troops (and probably himself) from that old trap of over-promising. Quite understandably, his spoken targets are rooted in likely reality, given how tight the margins are in F1 today, and how difficult it is to make great leaps in performance from one year to the next. He has called on Alpine to lap “significantly closer” to the sharp end of the grid, for the team to aim for another “solid fourth” in the constructors’ standings this year. “A good year for us is being a lot closer to third,” he said, “and perhaps a little bit further away from fifth.” Crikey. Don’t get too carried away now, Otmar.

Are such humble steps really the ambition, internally? It’s hard to imagine battle-hardened sporting director Alan Permane, one of a number of ‘lifers’ who date back to the Benetton days, settling for such a grey target. This is a wonderful F1 team packed with good people, and new recruits are joining to help reach the longer-term “100-race plan” as set out by CEO Laurent Rossi back in 2021 – the goal of becoming a winning team within a century of GPs from the Renault team’s rebrand at the start of 2021.

 

The team is currently 44 races in since the rebrand from Renault to Alpine, so the clock is ticking. Are Szafnauer and co pedalling fast enough to beat it?

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It’s easy to wonder too whether the team boasts a driver line-up that can truly inspire a return to the increasingly distant great days. Alonso, for a third time in his career, has deserted the Renault/Alpine cause in favour of an Aston Martin team that just might be about to kick against that accepted wisdom about big leaps being impossible in one bound. In his absence, Esteban Ocon and Pierre Gasly lead the all-French line.

Both have plenty to prove. Ocon mostly stacked up well against the awesome force that Alonso remains, but at 26 there’s little evidence so far to suggest he can dig deep for those truly special performances Alpine should demand. He faces in Gasly an old ‘frenemy’ who is finally free from treading water at AlphaTauri. Humiliated and rejected as a frontline talent by Red Bull, the 27-year-old must use this Alpine chance to prove Christian Horner wrong once and for all. But does he have it in him to rise above the merely decent? Both drivers have won a grand prix in peculiar circumstances, and both deserve a certain amount of credit. But just how much, we’re about to find out.

Then again, in modern F1 winning isn’t everything, is it? Sacrilege – but perhaps Alpine’s form doesn’t matter as much as it used to. Thanks to the cartel franchise structure created in this post-Bernie Ecclestone era, owning and running an F1 team is no longer a great way to lose a large fortune. It’s now a sustainable and actually lucrative business, which is precisely why most team principals are openly hostile to a new team diluting the enriched F1 waters.

2023 Alpine F1 driver Esteban Ocon at Bahrain pre-season test

Do Ocon and Gasly have what it takes to push Alpine to the front?

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Such an accusation would be a red rag to the dedicated people on the ground at the teams who remain truly, madly, deeply competitive, as they have always been. But at least on some level, towards the top of these increasingly corporate organisations, has it become acceptable – even if it’s on a subconscious level – just to simply accept existing and reap what benefits come? If that is the case, it’s another reason why an interloper such as Michael Andretti and his Cadillac-backed proposition should be made welcome, to shake the money tree if nothing else. The vulgar self-interest and new speculation about an engorged $600m entry fee for such entities are beyond distasteful.

And yet… even in such a world distorted by pure, blinkered avarice there’s still pride to consider. That old competitive instinct still rises, even to the top. Symonds’ words about those deflating Benetton years, about being merely “perfectly respectable” should haunt Team Enstone. Especially if Aston and Alonso – of all drivers – ruin Szafnauer’s sober target and jump ahead in the weeks and months that lie ahead. Now that would be awkward.

Still, even then it could be worse for Alpine. At least it isn’t McLaren.

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