There was a nice symmetry when, on the Friday of last month’s Le Mans 24 Hours, Alpine unveiled the prototype with which it will attempt to rekindle past glories in endurance racing. The French enduro happened to fall on the same dates this year as in 1978, when the Renault marque finally triumphed in a race in which it had had a long if interrupted presence since 1963. Much was made of that victory when the covers came off the new World Endurance Championship contender, which for the moment is known as the A424_ß. You could easily have misread that as A442B (above), the machine Didier Pironi and Jean-Pierre Jaussaud took to victory 35 years earlier, give or take the odd three days.
Alpine’s heritage in sportscar racing and at Le Mans is clearly important to a marque in the middle of a relaunch that kicked off with the second-generation A110 in 2017. Why else would it be stepping up with what can be described as its first full-house attack on the WEC, with an LMDh to
