Laurent Rossi reveals where new Alpine F1 funds will be spent

Laurent Rossi has said Alpine’s new investment will be spent away from the track rather than on it.

法国manufacturer announced on Monday that they had received £171m from Otro Capital, RedBird Capital Partners and Maximum Effort Investment in a deal that valued the brand at £700m.

Following the announcement, Rossi and Renault CEO Luca de Meo took to the stage at Alpine’s Enstone base to explain what the future of the brand is and while the majority of the presentation was focused on their car production, there were one or two hints about what to expect when it came to F1.

The main one of those was that this new investment will not actually be used to help the team progress in the sporting sense with Rossi stating that the staff at Enstone and Viry-Châtillon “know what they’re doing.”

“他们将help us on the monetisation side of the business,” Rossi said. “So strictly speaking not on the sports side.

“Obviously, people here [Enstone] know what they’re doing. People in Viry-Châtillon know what they’re doing. They’re going to continue doing what they’re doing.”

Instead the funds will be used to boost Alpine’s off-track activities including hospitality, sponsoring and merchandise.

“[The investment group is] going to help us boost our revenue,” the Alpine CEO said. “Hospitality, sponsoring, licensing, merchandising. Above and beyond what we have planned.

“A portion of that we will reinvest into facilities, into tools, into equipment. This is part of a plan that we already launched way before Redbird joined us, which we call Mountain Climber.

“We are hiring 80 people. So we’re going to simply boost this plan, accelerate it even further, in the limitations of the cost gap obviously. So this is how it’s going to help us indirectly continue on our path.”

It is not long since Rossi tore into the F1 outfit with the Alpine boss levelling accusations at team principal Otmar Szafnauer. His mood seemed somewhat more optimistic following their podium in Monaco.

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“The team is moving up,” Rossi continued. “Two years ago, we were a distant sixth really. We finished fourth this year. It’s a little bit complicated at the beginning of this season and it’s getting back into order, I hope we can just continue.

“We have a roadmap. It’s progress that you build one step at a time because it takes time to find the people, find the resources to complement our team because our team is slightly smaller than top teams.

“So we’re just going to continue growing, expanding up to a point where we have similar structures.

“The way of doing makes a difference and we believe our way of doing will make a difference because we have expertise here.”