Once sold as a bold roadmap back to glory, Alpine’s much-vaunted 100-race plan now reads like a cautionary tale – and Steve Nielsen isn’t interested in pretending otherwise.
Under the F1 veteran’s management, the Enstone squad is not just moving on from that failed philosophy, but actively dismantling it.
After a bruising 2025 campaign that ended with Alpine rooted to the bottom of the constructors’ championship, Nielsen has wasted little time distancing the team from the grand promises and artificial timelines that defined the previous regime.
Launched in 2021 alongside Renault’s rebrand to Alpine, the 100-race project – devised and promoted by former boss Laurent Rossi – was meant to deliver podiums by 2024 and race wins by 2025.
Instead, it delivered little more than churn, missed targets and a car – the A525 – that was effectively abandoned before the season even reached its midpoint.
Former Alpine executive Laurent Rossi, who devised the team's ill-fated 100-race plan.
Nielsen, who arrived in September, made it clear in Abu Dhabi that he has no patience for such countdown clocks.
“I’m not a person who believes in a 100-race plan or a three-year plan or a five-year plan,” Nielsen said in Abu Dhabi, quoted by Motorsport.com.
“I believe you put the best people you can get in the right positions, you give a clear mission, get the army marching all in the same direction, and you work as hard as you can and do the best job you can.
“You mill away at it, it’s a slow grinding process, and you hope, eventually, you do a better job than everybody else.”
It is a blunt rejection of the idea that success in modern Formula 1 can be scheduled, branded or marketed into existence. For Nielsen, Alpine’s previous approach wasn’t just optimistic – it was fundamentally flawed.
The damage left behind is clear. Alpine scored just 22 points in 2025, collecting points in only one of the final 11 races as focus shifted prematurely to the 2026 regulations. Nielsen is under no illusions about how far the team still has to climb.
“I can tell you we’re building a better car next year than we have this year,” he explained. “I can’t tell you whether that will line up first, 10th or 20th on the grid. I’m confident we’ve made a step, but the other nine teams are doing the same, so you don’t know how much progress they’ve made.
“All I know is we’re improving our structure, we’re recruiting in the areas where we’re weak, and that grinding process starts now. You can’t turn these things around in a few months or even a year.”
Unlike the neat milestones of the abandoned 100-race vision, Nielsen’s message is deliberately unglamorous. There are no promises of dates, no declarations of imminent breakthroughs — just work, time and uncertainty.
That realism is shaped by experience. Nielsen was part of Enstone during its Benetton and Renault championship peaks, and he knows how misleading historical comparisons can be.
“I was here when Renault bought Benetton the first time around,” he added. “It took three years to win a race and five years to win the championship, and that metric doesn’t necessarily apply today. It might be shorter, it might be longer – you just do the best you can.”
For 2026, Nielsen’s demands are modest – but telling. Alpine does not need rallying cries or long-term slogans rewritten on PowerPoint slides. It needs to show up, every weekend.
“I want to be racing every week, ideally for points,” he said. “We’ve managed that on the odd weekend this year, but too often we’ve been a long way off at the back.
“That’s not where this team belongs, it’s not where Enstone traditionally is, and it’s not where we want to be. We need to be fighting at the top end of the midfield for points every weekend.”
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In that closing line sits the quiet indictment of what came before. Alpine didn’t fail because 100 races wasn’t enough. It failed because belief was mistaken for progress.
Under Nielsen, the stopwatch has been thrown away – and with it, a plan that promised everything and delivered nothing.
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