A promise was made, a promise was kept. On this Friday, October 25, 2024, the site of Viruses-Châtillon is already hard at work when Bruno Famin receives us in his office. No great ceremony, our host takes care of the coffees himself. The storm of the project's shutdown F1 2026 has passed, we must move forward by taking the time to turn off some of the fake news circulating in the paddocks and the media. An educational work necessary to understand the financial springs that agitate the premier discipline of motor sport.
« It was important that we take stock of the present and future situation of Viry-Châtillon, Bruno Famin launches as a preamble. We will continue to provide the perfect Engine service until the end of 2025, which means all the last Grands Prix of 2024 and the whole of next season. The members of Viry-Châtillon will always do their utmost to make it work as well as possible for Alpine F1 Team"
This is not a grand oral presentation or an electoral campaign, but simply the need to put words and values to a pragmatic industrial decision, which is even incomprehensible when we do not know the hidden side of the cards. We announced this very profound Hypertech transformation project, which certainly has a social meaning, but which technically allows us to reorient ourselves towards innovation and R&D projects serving the brand. Alpine, of the whole group Renault and why not external clients, in addition to the sporting reinforcement of the other programs that remain. Viry-Châtillon will remain a “sporting” site with a reallocation of resources, because there is a financial context and an extraordinary brand project. This is what attracted me when I arrived in 2022. Recreating a French jewel and making it an international premium sports brand, all based on sportsmanship and competition, is a truly fabulous project. We are simply entering a new phase, and when we see the current economic model of F1, a real question has arisen… and has been answered. Hence the change. » The coffees are drunk, the interview can begin.
As an introduction, can you give us an overview of what Viry-Châtillon will be like in October 2024?
On the human level, there are around 500 people – all types of employment contracts combined – on the site, including 334 with contracts Alpine Racing. The others are service providers, whether it be canteen staff, security, etc. The activities obviously concern Formula 1 with the development and operation of this year's F1 RE24 engine, next year's RE25, and the RE26 which has just stopped. At the same time, we have many other sporting activities: the project Endurance, certainly not as big as the F1 one, but very important for the brand with many resources involved, because the whole program is managed from Viry. We rely on Signatech's resources for the operation, but all the Performance, Systems Development, Software, Powertrain operation parts, everything is developed in Viry. To give an example, the A424 software is a mix of Formula 1 software and Formula E. Why Formula E? Because we also develop the entire "manufacturer" perimeter, in the FIA sense of the term, which equips the Nissan teams and McLaren. All supervision of the Dacia Dakar program is done here, as well as customer competition with Renault products and AlpineFinally, the Alpenglow prototype and its hydrogen thermal engine demonstrator are being developed in Viry.
What direct impact will there be on the activity following this announcement? Is a transfer of F1 skills to other programs so easily conceivable?
With the transformation project, all sports programs remain, or are even strengthened, particularly in Endurance where we will be able to allocate additional resources to take a new step thanks to our F1 experts. Then, there will be a reallocation of skills on all new industrial projects in order to feed the know-how of the Renault group and contribute to the development of the brand. Alpine.
Many things, true or not so true, have been propagated to motivate or justify this decision. Starting with the human skills to be successful. Hard words to hear for men and women with such a track record in Formula 1. Can you clarify the situation?
If the decision was taken to stop the development of the F1 2026 engine, it is not because we did not believe in its future performance, but because there is an economic equation so unfavourable to the engine manufacturers in Formula 1 that it was much more profitable for Alpine to allocate these resources to the development of its brand and its new projects. This does not detract from the strategy ofAlpine to gain notoriety and image through motorsport. The commitment to Formula 1 remains, the commitment to Endurance remains, and it is thanks to these vectors of notoriety that we intend to develop the brand throughout the world. It is about rationalizing and optimizing resources by using Viry's rare know-how to bring real added value to the brand. It is not about declaring yourself sporty for the sake of it, you have to prove it. The new electric motors we are working on will amaze with their road behavior. Viry is fortunate to be agile, responsive, which will allow us to work on shorter cycles than other technical departments of the brand. This is not a questioning of Viry's skills or sporting results, it is a much more macroeconomic approach.
You point out the economic model of Formula 1 with regard to engine manufacturers. Can you expand on your thoughts?
Engine manufacturers are stuck by the redistribution of money made by the FOM (Formula One Management. Ed.) to the teams exclusively, and strictly nothing to the engine manufacturers, and by the FIA which obliges these same engine manufacturers to rent their engines to the teams which request them at a fixed price of 17 million dollars per season for two cars. With this sum, we barely pay for the parts and we do not absorb any R&D. On the other hand, the financial regulations (budget cap. Ed.) imposes a ceiling on engine expenditure that is far too high – $135 million per year – a ceiling that does not include all actual expenditure. For example, not everyone has the same social security contributions, so the FIA has excluded this parameter from the calculation of the budget cap.
You're telling us that from 2026, the Engine cap budget will be equivalent to that of the complete operation of the chassis team? So it's becoming waste again...
Until 2025 inclusive, the Engine ceiling is 95 million dollars, then it will be 135 million from 2026. This ceiling is much too high, because by integrating all the expenses I was talking about, we will be more like 180-190 million euros. annual to develop the engine. The regulatory framework will allow, alternately every other year, to redo either the entire electrical energy recovery system or the internal combustion engine. So we will have to develop at full speed, and over a 4-5 year cycle, this will represent around a billion dollars of investment. If we are in F1, it is to be competitive, so we have to go all out. Spending half as much money as our competitors while thinking we are twice as smart is no longer an option. So we have to invest this amount when, on the other hand, the regulation limits rental to 17 million annually. The difference is huge for a field that is certainly important, but which we only talk about when things are going badly...
Should the engine budget have been capped at $50-60 million annually to make sense of their development? Would you have been able to make a super F1 engine with that amount of money?
Everyone would have had the same if they had done their best with that amount. The distortion between buying an engine and designing it would have been less and would have made sense of developing our own solution. The rental price is too low and the spending cap is too high.
Who says that once you have stopped your 2026 project, the engine manufacturers, the FOM and the FIA will not agree to increase the rental price of the engines? The trap would close…
There were many of us around the table who wanted this increase – not all of us otherwise we would have achieved it – but we did not succeed for the 2026 generation. It simply went from 15 to 17 million dollars per year.
Why was this whole educational approach not put forward by Luca de Meo (CEO of the Renault group) at the time of the 2026 announcement? We mainly retained the idea that the engine made in Viry was not efficient and that he had lost faith in its ability to be so in 2026…
Luca de Meo has never aimed for performance and has been very clear on the subject: this is a project of re-allocation of resources in the interest of the group andAlpine.
Is Formula 1 playing a dangerous game by devaluing the role of engine manufacturers? It prohibits Cadillac from entering the championship without developing its own engine, but allows Toyota to sponsor Haas, which has an engine Ferrari ? It can blow up its entire economic model!
Of course! That's what he did Alfa Romeo with Sauber (from 2018 to 2023. Editor's note) and which broke the previous single model which was made up of manufacturers who did everything - chassis and engine - and private teams who rented an engine. Renault brought about a first revolution in 1977 by being the first generalist manufacturer to get involved in F1 to develop its reputation with the turbo engine, the Michelin radial tire, etc. It was an incredible big bang which brought in BMW and others. Today, the models are exploding: Alfa Romeo sponsors and renames the team for a super interesting price, Toyota is going to do something a bit hybrid with technical support, Ford is going to rebadge the engine Red Bull, etc. Formula 1 is evolving and already suggests that future engines (by 2030. Ed.) will be simpler, or even all or part with common parts. All this has obviously fueled our Engine thinking. Some show that it is no longer prohibitive not to have your engine to win (example of McLaren with Mercedes. Ed.). This is the message that is sent and that we have received. At the same time, I have a brand to develop, an extraordinary product plan in the pipeline, we are reviewing our investments accordingly. There is real consistency in our reasoning and in the decision of the Renault group.
So explain to us why Formula 1 is vetoing Cadillac's arrival if it doesn't develop its own engine? It's a bit of a double standard, and why is no one denouncing Toyota's arrival at a lower cost?
Simply because the teams are not decision-makers, things happen between the FOM and the FIA. But we are moving away from the subject of Viry…
Yes and no, since this state of affairs led to your decision to stop the 2026 engine, the relevance having disappeared...
Each engine manufacturer has different interests and vision. In the case ofAlpine exclusively, it is more relevant today to use the resources previously dedicated to the development of an F1 engine for other projects.
Why then did you start developing the 2026 engine and then stop it?
Because the 2026 financial regulation on engines – with this gap that is too big between rental price and development cap budget – is very recent. We did not know it before. And once we have said all that, we still have not started to talk about the “Performance” aspect of the engine!
What do you mean?
Today, we are accused of being the weakest engine on the grid, which is "perhaps" true. I say "perhaps", because there has been enormous progress made in 2022. On the best of the grid, I tend to say that we are missing 15 kW (20 horses. Ed.) to the wheel. Since 2022, all the hardware (coins. Ed.) is frozen, but we have made a leap in energy management and recovery. The regulations still allow us to approve software (software. Editor's note) per year. To touch the hardware, we would need the agreement of all the F1 players and we don't have it. From there, we have to ask ourselves where these 15 kW come from, because no one knows the real power of each one. These are only extrapolations made from GPS readings of speeding up. These 15 kW can come from the engine, but also from the transmission, etc. It is therefore advisable not to overwhelm our engine as I can read in the press. Assuming that these 15 kW are only in the engine - which is not the case - then we would be talking about 2 tenths of a second per lap on average. That means from 0 at Monaco to 4 tenths at Monza. Depending on the qualifying, that would mean one to two lines lost on the grid, and almost zero places over the entire race.
Should we understand that Viry is a "victim" of the chassis performance deficit, and therefore of Enstone?
There is no victim, there is a project and everyone is doing their best. The primary reason for this decision, I repeat, is based on the relevance of developing your engine in Formula 1. The relative importance of the engine in overall performance no longer requires investing so much money. You can no longer make a difference in this area. What makes you win today is aerodynamics and tire management. Then, in all the teams where I have worked, I have always experienced a war between engine designers and aerodynamicists, which is normal. We have different individual objectives: the engine designer wants his engine to breathe and cool well, and the aerodynamicist does not want radiators on his car. It is the same everywhere, so it is not specific to Alpine, Viry or Enstone. Really, that's not the question. On the chassis side, to answer you, I'm ultra confident that what we're missing will soon be reduced, because David Sanchez (new technical director ofAlpine F1 Team arrives in spring. Editor's note) is doing a great job with his teams. He is a very good person who brings a technical clairvoyance that is extremely beneficial for the future. To beat us in front, we are talking today about the order of a second on a lap.
You wanted to put an end to the rumors, let's tackle another one: the English press, often well informed, because it is directly fed by the tap of the F1 players, claims that Cadillac is about to buy the intellectual property of your 2026 engine. What can you say to that?
We will not sell our intellectual property because Viry's know-how is its capital. We want to keep our added value in our future project and we do not want to part with that. Finally, we are not going to help competitors beat us, that would make no sense. So no, it is totally out of the question to sell this intellectual property.
Staff representatives assured us that this 2026 engine would be fantastic, but how can we believe them?
I agree with them that it would have been fabulous. We have taken incredible technical steps, there have been real challenges, extremely interesting technological breakthroughs. I am proud of the team that led this project, of the men and women of Viry, and I know that we are on a performance trajectory that many of our competitors would like to have today. My guys are right to say that – “probably” since we will never see it in action – it is an excellent engine that would have put us back in the game… of engines. Which remains of order 2 in the overall performance of the car, I said it earlier.
Can we exclude that Alpine runs with a customer engine – which we don’t know yet – and is the white label engine manufacturer of a newcomer who decides to pay for the entire development?
Yes, that is totally out of the question.
Taking the matter further, and because motorizing a second team no longer has any economic interest for a manufacturer, the idea that a customer team would have allowed the project to be saved was therefore false?
There is no longer a business model in providing a customer engine. At best it is financially neutral, at worst it costs a little money and you then have to find technical relevance and a marketing story to tell… which you cannot do with a newcomer.
Let's get back to the future of Viry-Châtillon. We do not hide from you a deep reservation about the creation of an electrical and hydrogen development center, called Hypertech Alpine, these strategic areas are now the business of subcontractors – often Asian – investing billions of dollars. How can we fight?
There are two subjects here and therefore two different issues. Concerning hydrogen, we believe that for Alpine Racing and/or utility applications (Renault group is part of the Hymot consortium. Ed.), the preferred option is the thermal engine, which meets the needs of high loads better than a fuel cell. And incidentally, it still makes noise at the exhaust, and in competition, it is not unpleasant. (Laughs) In particular, we need to review the injectors and the combustion chambers, and these skills are present in Viry-Châtillon thanks to Formula 1. There is no need for billions of euros of investment, and the work carried out on the Alpenglow V6 Hy6 is remarkable in terms of combustion. We are right at the heart of our know-how for this technology. These are the same people and the same tools who designed the F1 2026 engine and the V6 Hy6, I assure you, and it is thanks to this organization that we have obtained such results. The hydrogen engine displays more than 740 horsepower, and in reality it is even a little more, but we are already anticipating the future BoP in Endurance. (Laughs)
What about electric next?
One of the concerns of the Renault group is the international competition, and in particular Chinese, which is extremely fierce. The idea of Hypertech Alpine is to reintegrate know-how that has been outsourced to suppliers until now. Luca de Meo was very clear on this point: we need to re-appropriate skills in innovation and Viry, with its short cycles, its processes and its very agile personnel experienced in competition, is suitable for reinitiating this type of development. We are not talking about developing a battery gigafactory around the corner, but many technologies are currently emerging. We need to assimilate them internally, then play on synergies and complementarities with our colleagues in the group and our suppliers. In Formula 1 for example, you should know thatAlpine designs and manufactures its batteries entirely in Viry so that they are 100% custom-made. The idea will then be the same, at the group level, to recover a strong industrial secret.
In the idea of the appropriation of skills, what is the relevance of buying the Signatech team, in charge of your Endurance operation, when all your opponents – Porsche with Penske, BMW with WRT, Ferrari with AF Corse.… – remain faithful to the model of service providers obliged to perform under penalty of losing their contract, as well as to keep the activities in Bourges when the technical skills are in Viry?
This investment does not only meet the needs of the FIA programme WEC. There are many other activities within the Signatech group of which we are a client, such as the events, marketing, promotion and customer competition part (Clio Cup, Alpine Europa Cup, A110 RGT, etc.). This is again a business strategy and I would like to point out that Signatech has contributed a lot to Alpine for ten years in competition. This team has played the game extraordinarily well while we were only a sponsor, so there is a form of continuity and loyalty in this relationship. It is also a clear signal sent as to our presence in Endurance which does not have the ambition to be ephemeral. The Hypercar project has always been piloted from Viry, with a lot of engineering, and only the operation remains in Bourges. There are no plans for repatriation.
With the future of Endurance and the Hypercar category looking towards hydrogen in the next 4-5 years, will you start your work quickly?
We have always said that we are interested in this technology and are looking closely at the developments in the 2028 regulations. The FIA and the ACO (Automobile Club de l'Ouest. Ed.) are working on the whole security aspect in particular. Let's wait and see what actually happens and we'll decide.
Are you still a partner of Oreca on this hydrogen project?
We were on the first phase of the project in 2023 when the Alpenglow Hy4 was equipped with a 4-cylinder turbo. Today, it is called Hy6 and its 6-liter naturally aspirated V3,5 is 100% in-house. The car is also prepared in a workshop, here in Viry.
Are there any plans to supply an A424 to a customer team?
In the FIA WEC, grid positions are starting to be expensive, so I don't think so. At the same time, we believe that we still have work to do to reach the level of preparation and performance that we have set for ourselves, which is to compete at the front in every race. A podium at Fuji is great, but we still have 2-3 steps to go to be among the best. We don't want to spread ourselves too thin with a customer team that wouldn't bring us much, except for additional costs.IMSA, it's something else. We have always said that motorsport is there to support the brand strategy, the day when Alpine will land on the North American continent, we will carefully consider the relevance of conducting a program there.
To conclude, during the 6 Hours of Austin last August, you told us that no development of the Hypercar engine was planned for 2025. How can we aim for victories with the current powertrain with its improvable reliability?
It is obvious that after the 24 Hours of Le Mans (double abandonment after 4 hours of racing. Ed.), we have a reliability problem to resolve at the valve level, but also on two or three other themes of the engine. We have tackled it and we will have an evolution on this theme of reliability in 2025.
Interview by Romain Bernard
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JY Freeberge
31/10/2024 at 01:20 a.m.
If the importance of the engine is so relative in performance, we should perhaps also question the English antenna for the chassis. Why not Dallara to stay in the same spirit.
Yves-Henri RANDIER
29/10/2024 at 09:52 a.m.
Pure pragmatism from Bruno FAMIN who has never really been a fan of wooden language! I am convinced that if the 2030 engine regulations return to a "high revs" atmo burning e-fuel or liquid hydrogen, some engine manufacturers will question the relevance of having spent so much on the 2026 engine, especially since the electrification of the automobile in Europe and even in the United States will cause damage and even deaths in the industry
Patrick33
29/10/2024 at 06:07 a.m.
Bruno Famin 🤣🤣🤣🤣 the devoted and very obedient gentleman in the service of DE MEO, he would do better to keep quiet.
vincent moyet
29/10/2024 at 10:31 a.m.
F1 is a technological showcase. And a double-edged sword: either you succeed and demonstrate your excellence, or you fail and in terms of image, it is negative. I do not want to shoot the ambulance, but when no small team buys your F1 engine, who will believe in your skills in other disciplines? It will be a long-term job to regain this credibility that Viry had forged with its many successes in F1.