Alpine and Mercedes teaming up? 'They're going to have a huge backlog'
F1 News
Alpine's Formula 1 team is in huge doubt about the future. The main issue is: to continue with the in-house developed and built power units or not? It has now been confirmed that exploratory talks have been held with Mercedes about buying its power units from the '26 season onwards. Toto Wolff, the CEO of the Mercedes F1 Team, is not opposed to this in principle. But whether fitting a Mercedes engine into the '26 car is still possible is another question.
Mercedes is quite happy for Alpine to make use of the German power units. This is because Wolff believes that with more customers - besides Williams and McLaren - more money will come in and also faster development can be done because of the huge amount of data available. Zak Brown, McLaren's CEO, also thinks it is not a problem if Mercedes makes the Alpine team stronger.
Vowles questions advantage for Alpine
James Vowles, Williams' team boss, when asked, states that he also thinks it is a good thing if Alpine gets access to the Mercedes power sources. But in that case, the French will face a huge challenge, he warns. "We have been working alongside Mercedes in order to get the concept right for '26 already for many, many months. And so whatever you do, you're going to be six to 12 months behind the three other teams," Vowles argues.
"That's quite penalising in the grand scheme of things. It doesn't mean it's unachievable, but there are going to be areas where you're going to be compromising on. There's a tremendous amount of work getting '26 right, and the smallest decision on layout can actually have quite a large impact," said the Williams team boss.