Currently, Alpine is the only engine manufacturer in F1 than just supplies to its works team. By 2021, Alpine, formerly Renault, lost its only engine customer in McLaren which made the jump to Mercedes power this year. The Renault owned team strives to change this next year and has revealed that it has had talks with several potential customers and prospective new entrants in the sport who could use its power unit. In 2022, Alpine is said to be working on a new engine that will take inspiration from the concept pioneered by Mercedes but at the end of this year there is an engine development freeze which means the next new engine Alpine will release will only come in 2025, for which there are conversations ongoing between F1, the FIA, the engine manufacturers and potential new teams and manufacturers like the Volkswagen group brands Audi and Porsche.
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"There are people who are interested in entering the sport," said Alpine F1 executive director Marcin Budkowski.
"Some of them have made themselves public and have been covered in the press over the past couple of years. Some of them have not looked for publicity or public knowledge," he added, hinting towards Audi and Porsche whose CEOs attended the meeting with the F1 stakeholders in July during the weekend of the 2nd race in Austria for the next engine formula for the sport.
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"There's a lot of people interested in Formula 1 because it's a great sport and hopefully it is going to become a sustainable and maybe profitable business with the cost cap and improved prize fund," he added saying that the sport was becoming more attractive to more potential teams as the cost of entry and success was being actively reduced.
"So, there's lots of interest. We have talked to prospective entrants. At the moment it hasn't borne fruit in terms of a new entrant," he added.
Alpine also needs customer data desperately to quickly evolve its engine and make it reliable, something it will start to miss from this year onwards. On the flip side, Mercedes supplier to itself, Aston Martin, Williams and McLaren starting this year. Ferrari also has Alfa Romeo and Haas as its customers apart from its own works team. Honda supplies to Red Bull and its sister team Alpha Tauri and next year that Honda IP will be part of Red Bull powertrains, and at a minimum, it will always have data from two teams.
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"The concern is you come with a new engine, you come into an engine freeze, you still have the right to do changes for reliability reasons, so if we had a big reliability issue we could still fix it," added Budkowski.
"The engine freeze makes it more difficult to evolve something. So we are very focused on delivering the right package from the beginning of the season to be able to de-risk it as much as we can over the winter. You've got dynos for this. You can do some extensive testing. But nothing replaces bolting an engine in a car and getting it around a track," he explained.
