How much Alpine are set to pay if they use Mercedes power units from 2026

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Alpine will undergo an important change for the 2026 season when it ditches its in-house power units in favour of switching to a customer team.

Bosses at Renault finally decided on the fate of their Formula 1 engine project after months of speculation, with the French manufacturer set to reallocate staff in its Viry Chatillon base to other projects relating to their road cars.

Chief executive Luca de Meo said he was ‘saddened’ by the closure of the project, after hostility from members of the Alpine team which included protests at the recent Italian Grand Prix.

Renault had planned to produce a power unit for the 2026 season having been named as one of the six PU manufacturers by the FIA, but the board of the company has since voted to scrap it to reduce costs.

It is now expected Alpine will switch to Mercedes engines for 2026 onwards, having reached an agreement during the Monza weekend. Details of how much it would cost for Alpine to become customers were revealed in a recent interview with De Meo for L’Équipe.

Alpine to spend millions on becoming a customer for Mercedes

Rather than spend millions more producing their power unit for the 2026 season, Alpine will pay upwards of £15 million to use Mercedes power units when the new regulations come into effect.

De Meo explained the reason for switching to a customer engine for 2026 was in part due to the headcount at Viry Chatillon not matching what is seen at Mercedes at their facility in Brixworth.

“They [Mercedes] have test benches that we don’t have. The transition to the hybrid era required powerful investments that were underestimated at the time. We operate, structurally, with three cylinders when others have eight,” said De Meo.

“When I arrived four years ago, the group wanted to stop F1. If it’s still there, it’s because I saved the thing. But we don’t have the structure to be at the forefront of battery chemistry development, software management, energy recovery.”

Alpine makes ‘humiliating’ admission over future

While it is nothing new for road car manufacturers to run different engines in F1, with Aston Martin currently running Mercedes engines and set to switch to Honda for 2026, there is something different about how Alpine has arrived at its current position.

Not only is it a loss of decades worth of history in F1, which French F1 driver Romain Grosjean labelled ‘sad’ when he learned of the closure, but Alpine has also admitted defeat before they have started.

READ MORE: Oliver Oakes claims Alpine have ‘performance to come’ as late season upgrades arrive

Renault was always the weakest of the four current PU manufacturers, which is due to how much the Viry Chatillon operation was scaled back before the switch to hybrid engines in 2014.

This was done amid the 2008 engine freeze, which led to F1 using the same 4.0 litre V8s for six years before the full hybrid switch.