Alpine Buoyed by Engine Updates; First Top-Five for A424

Charles Milesi believed Alpine achieved a “perfect weekend” recording a maiden top-five finish for the A424 LMDh car in the FIA World Endurance Championship in the first weekend after it rolled out reliability-focused engine updates.

The No. 35 car, which Milesi shared with Paul-Loup Chatin and Ferdinand Habsburg, was classified fifth at the end of the Lone Star Le Mans event at Circuit of The Americas.

In the process, the three drivers improved upon Alpine’s best finish with the A424 to date, having previously secured seventh in the season-opening Qatar 1812km.

The result came the day after Milesi starred with fourth place in Hyperpole, although the car dropped back down in the early stages when Habsburg was given a drive-through penalty for contact with Earl Bamber on the opening lap.

As Milesi pointed out, Alpine’s result, which beat both Porsche Penske Motorsport entries, was notable as it was the only Hypercar manufacturer not to take part in a pre-event test in mid-July.

“I think we thought that it was going to be more like a handicap,” Milesi told Sportscar365.

“But in the end, we managed to do some good steps during the weekend and we built something from there. We had a real competitive car in this race.”

The Frenchman admitted that the result was beyond what Alpine itself had predicted coming into the event, describing it as a “perfect weekend.”

“I think we didn’t thought that it was going to be possible this weekend,” Milesi said.

“We thought that we were going to be able to be in the top ten. But yeah, top five is a real, real result for the stage of the program.

“The car was good, the place was amazing. So I think we can say that it’s a perfect weekend with the P4 in Hyperpole and finishing in the top five.

“Clearly, we thought that the tire degradation and tire management was going to be worse than that on our car.

“But I think in the end, we didn’t really know the steps we did between Sao Paulo and here. Now we have the confirmation that it was a really good step.

“We gained some consistency with the car [under] braking, which was our main struggle since the beginning of the program.

“Still some work to do, but I think we are getting there. And there are still some things to improve for sure. But these are the things that will come next year, hopefully. I think now we hope that we will be able to achieve the same thing in two weeks in Fuji.”

The six-hour race in Texas marked the first race since Alpine was able to implement reliability-focused upgrades that had been in the pipeline since the marque’s double retirement in the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

“We just got a new camshaft and probably we will have some more things coming for next year,” Milesi explained.

“We just got one update here, because it was critical to get some fixes for the Le Mans issues. Now we can use the engine as we were using it before.”

Bruno Famin, Alpine’s Vice President of Motorsports, said the upgrades have allowed the brand to ‘decrease the risk level’ after implementing initial software countermeasures in Sao Paulo.

“We don’t have everything [we are planning] yet because we didn’t have time to validate the evolution, but we [had] some new bits [here],” Famin told Sportscar365. “The risk level has decreased for sure.”

When asked when the remaining updates are set to arrive, Famin replied: “We don’t know yet if it’s the end of this season, or the start of next season.”

Jamie Klein contributed to this report