How Alpine signing a fourth F1 reserve driver replicates Briatore’s Renault

You may be wondering why Alpine has just signed a fourth Formula 1 reserve driver. There may be tens or even hundreds of thousands of reasons, if not millions.

Alpine has already been rebuilding its young-driver programme under new leadership after the embarrassingly disastrous loss of Oscar Piastri in 2022.

And stuffing the ranks with young hopefuls is very much in keeping with the return of Flavio Briatore to this team’s top table: back in the early 2000s, when it was running as Renault, its ‘Driver Academy’ had a fascinating mix of individuals. Some of them were clearly F1 material, others were obviously paying for the privilege.

The man who recruited them, oversaw training camps as far afield as Kenya, and who often had a finger in the pie of managing the most promising, was Briatore.

Taking 2001-2002 as a snapshot, the scheme would have the likes of Renault’s F1 drivers Giancarlo Fisichella and Jenson Button training alongside Fernando Alonso (who Briatore was grooming to replace Button), Heikki Kovalainen, Robert Kubica, Tiago Monteiro, Fabio Carbone, Eric Salignon and Carlo van Dam. The latter five were net contributors to the corporate coffers via personal sponsorship – yes, even Kubica, who was part of Renault/Briatore’s programme for just one year.

With that in mind it’s easy to see why the Briatore-era Alpine should have four young drivers in full kit cluttering up the garage on race weekends, while most other teams get by with one – or even none.

Maini will be busier than most since he will also be contesting his third full season in Formula 2, changing teams again after a largely disappointing 2024 with Invicta as team-mate to eventual champion Gabriel Bortoleto.

Part of the Alpine Academy setup since 2023, Maini shares a manager (Guillaume le Goff) with Alpine driver Pierre Gasly and has a mentoring arrangement with double world champion Mika Hakkinen.

He brings substantial corporate backing from India, where there is a significant push to get an Indian driver onto the F1 grid for the first time since Narain Karthikeyan’s outings with the moribund HRT outfit in 2011-12.

It’s still far from clear what Maini will actually do beyond simulator work and track testing of older F1 machinery via the Testing of Previous Cars (TPC) protocols. Only Hirakawa – currently racing for Toyota in the WEC – has been confirmed for a grand prix weekend FP1 (Japan) slot so far; that leaves three others up for grabs.

“Kush has impressed the team across his TPC performances and Formula 2 results whilst we have been working with him and we expect he will continue to do so in 2025,” said Julian Rouse, who superintends the Alpine Academy.

“His wider role allows us to further expand our pool of driving talent who can provide support and resources to the whole team during the busy season.”

Ryo Hirakawa, Alpine

Photo by: Pirelli

This level of vagueness is in keeping with team principal Oliver Oakes’ response to a question at the recent Bahrain test about how Alpine proposed to organise its reserve drivers – at that point of course, there were just three of them.

“They’re all going to share a room,” he joked, before saying that the amount of F1 testing they’ll actually get has yet to be decided.

“I think there’s a little bit of a split, because obviously Franco has done a load of grands prix, Paul Aron hasn’t done anything and Ryo’s done probably a bit of everything, so there is a bit of a balance there.”  

Aron, a former Mercedes junior, is the only one of the four whose job title is ‘reserve driver’ rather than ‘test and reserve driver’.

Alpine announced him in the wake of Jack Doohan’s elevation to an F1 seat and he drove in the post-season test at Yas Marina – displacing Victor Martins, who has recently left the Alpine setup ‘by mutual consent’, as has F1 Academy champion Abbi Pulling. Those exits have cleared the way for new faces in Alpine’s young-driver programme – Nina Gademan in F1 Academy and karters Ilie Tristan Crisan and Sukhmani Kaur Khera.

Managing up-and-coming drivers is always a juggling act – one in which the key challenge is not just to identify the best young talent and develop them, but also to keep them in play until an opportunity comes up in F1.

Franco Colapinto, Alpine F1 Team

Photo by: Alpine

That’s where the previous Alpine Academy management failed with Piastri.

Four into one – or even two – doesn’t stack up mathematically. The likelihood is that only Colapinto will move forward in the near future while Alpine’s other reserve drivers are, in effect, ‘pay and display’. It certainly helps with the bottom line – and even though Colapinto is highly rated at the moment, Briatore will have at least one eye on sponsorship from Latin America.

So far only Mercado Libre has appeared on the Alpine roster, while Globant has chosen to partner with F1 itself, but there’s talk of other Argentine businesses being interested – along with other Latam corporates such as Telmex. It’s a tantalising set of possibilities for Briatore, who is understood to have enjoyed a healthy payday for brokering the MSC Cruises deal with F1.

So as far as young drivers these days are concerned – to paraphrase John F Kennedy, ask not what your team can do for you, but what you can do for your team (and its bottom line).