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With everything pointing to Renault gearing up to sell its Alpine-branded Formula 1 team, could it provide Andretti’s F1 bid with the lifeline it needs to finally be accepted onto the grid?
Andretti has still been scaling up its planned 2026 entry bid that F1’s management arm rejected back in January. The team has continued to build up a new facility in Silverstone and has hired names including F1’s own former chief technical officer Pat Symonds to join it.
Amid all that, there have been interjections from a senior United States politician and more recently the launch of an anti-trust investigation by the United States Department of Justice into Liberty Media’s shunning of Andretti’s bid.
Whether the political pressure and Andretti’s efforts to prove it is F1-ready without an official entry yet change anything remains to be seen.
But could Renault provide a far cleaner route for Andretti into F1?
Who would buy Renault?
We’ve already documented all the reasons why Renault’s likely to be selling its Alpine F1 team.
But if it did so, who would it sell to and which team would the fans want it to? That’s the question YouTube community member @sonic_hill asked in our bumper YouTube Community Q&A with Glenn Freeman, Edd Straw and Scott Mitchell-Malm.
“The fan perspective is probably that they want Andretti to buy Alpine and then get that spot on the grid that so many people think Andretti, General Motors and Cadillac should be entitled to,” Mitchell-Malm replied.
“I have my doubts about whether that will happen. There are various reasons for that.
“But I would just like to see someone with an actual sporting ambition [buy Renault]. I would like to think that is also shared by the majority of fans as well.
“For example, people have been linking Alpine with Hitech, with the fact that Oliver Oakes, the Hitech boss, is now the team principal at Alpine. Hitech in the past was very closely linked with Uralkali and the Mazepin family, so is Mazepin going to end up on the grid?
“You wouldn’t want an owner that comes in and takes over Alpine if Renault does sell, just to further agendas like that, putting a mediocre driver in F1. We’ve already got a situation that flirts with that quite perilously with Aston Martin and the Strolls. And Lance Stroll is a demonstrably much better driver than Nikita Mazepin.
“I would just like to see an owner who is willing to put sporting ambition first.”
When F1 and FIA were deciding whether to adopt an 11th team on the grid, the ‘value’ that teams bring was one of the central themes.
However, as Straw points out, that same barrier of entry doesn’t apply when it comes to buying and selling an existing F1 team.
“There’s precious little F1 can do about judging the value they can bring and they certainly won’t care about the fans," he said.
“If someone buys this team, that just gets them in because they own a team. There’s no control over that.
“There will be some bad potential owners but it’s hard to imagine somebody not offering more to F1 than Renault has. OK, they’ve invested a lot and having a manufacturer in is good. But they’ve been consistently disappointing so the bar is not as high as it might have to be for adding value, however you want to quantity that.”
Freeman concurred: “It’s just sad, Renault has such a great F1 history, spanning so many different eras. Loads of success. If this most recent era of Renault in F1 is about to end, what is it going to be remembered for?
“There’s not been enough in this era to be properly memorable.”
Will Andretti regret not pursuing Alpine?
OnceUponATechie asked: “Given that the Andretti team is keen to establish themselves as the 11th team on the F1 grid but is not interested in buying Alpine, will they regret their decision if Alpine successfully sells the team to HitechGP?”
“Andretti doesn’t want to buy Alpine because it comes with too much baggage and they’re going full steam ahead with their own start-up team,” Straw said.
“They haven’t backed off since F1 said no. They’re pushing on, all guns blazing. The thinking is that they will be let in. There’s the anti-trust investigation going on, and they’re expecting come 2026 to be on the grid.
“They don’t think F1 can keep them out.
"Now if they get to 2026 and they’re still on the outside looking in they might have reason to think ‘hmm maybe we should have taken that Renault option’. But I just don’t think they’re thinking about that right now.
“They do not want Alpine because it’s just a negative to their efforts. I wouldn’t completely rule some way to incentivise them to do it, but the problem is if you’re selling a team, there are so many potential buyers out there.
“There are not many who can buy a team but if you’ve got 10-15 entries floating around interested - and there are a lot of them - some of them won’t be able to pull it off, some will. Then the price gets pushed up and up and up. It’s a seller's market.
“So Andretti might also look at it economically and think ‘actually this team will cost so much’ [but] they could buy it and transplant it completely to their own operation. It wouldn’t be the most cost-effective way to do it and you have to ask ‘do they have the cash for it?’. They’ve already spent a huge amount and they’d be spending $1billion+ on an F1 team.
“If they wanted all of it, they’d need to buy out not only Alpine who own 76% of it, but also that American investment company as well. It’s complicated.
“I think Andretti are backing themselves to get on the grid, partly through the anti-trust route and F1 realising they cannot justify keeping them out.”
A faux 2028 carrot?
Of course, when it rejected it for 2026, F1 did open the door to an Andretti-Cadillac bid that’s supported by a factory General Motors engine project. But is that actually a realistic prospect?
“F1 is still dangling that carrot of ‘well if you’re going to be a full-on works team in 2028, just enter in ‘28 when that’s ready’,” Mitchell-Malm explained.
“But Andretti’s attitude is that they’re going full guns blazing to be ready sooner than that. And they don’t want to hang around, if they’ve spending all this money, they want to cash in and get the value of being in F1 as soon as possible.
“It’s very much an open topic and it might be a bit of who blinks first? Will F1 back down under escalating political pressure? Or will Andretti look at something like the Enstone possibility and go ‘ah actually this, ridiculously, might just be the most cost-efficient route’? Otherwise they’ll have to wait until 2028, spend a load of money in the meantime, and then have to pay an $800million anti-dilution fund or something nonsense that gets stuck into Concorde.
“That’s the kind of thing they could be battling.”
Freeman said he was “massively sceptical about the 2028 stuff” and expects when the new Concorde Agreement gets agreed upon ahead of 2026, it “will make it even harder or even impossible for another team to come in. That’s when F1 becomes the closed shop that everybody in there now wants it to be”.
Straw added “It’s worth noting that there’s no entry process for 2028. Andretti has asked ‘OK what do we do to apply for 2028?’ There’s no process, so that carrot on a stick is made up until a process exists.
“We should remember, that although there may be other things distracting those doing these investigations, Liberty Media have other concerns with anti-trust with [Liberty-owned] Live Nation [for monopolisation and other unlawful conduct that thwarts competition in markets across the live entertainment industry].
“So as a company, it’s in the sights, not just because of F1. It’s probably something they should take seriously.”
