Alpine’s Nico Lapierre told reporters that Alpine has put in “a lot of work” to adapt the Mecachrome V6 3.4-litre turbocharged engine for its new purpose in Alpine’s A424 WEC Hypercar.
“It has been a lot of work to adapt this engine to endurance racing,” said the Frenchman.
“The structure is the same, but everything inside has been changed. And one of the strengths of Alpine, they have a lot of engine bench in Viry-Châtillon, and I can assure you that the engine was running a lot on the bench.
“And also we’ve been able to run already 30 hours in a row on the simulation. So on the engine side, we are quite okay.”
The engine has had a varied life, having been used in the Formula 2 and Formula 3 single seater cars, as well as in Ginetta’s G60-LT-P1 LMP1 car, before the British company switched to an AER-built engine.
However, the engine, known as the V634, is not known for being overly reliable, with the Formula 2 cars having multiple engine-related issues over the last few seasons. It is this, then, that raises cause for concern with Alpine’s choice of engine for the brand new A424. Lapierre, though, sees no issues in the future.
“I mean, Le Mans is special, as you know,” the veteran sportscar racer continued.
“It’s a very different track, different conditions, but so far so good for this engine. And of course, it’s the 3.4, base that you know, but it has been really drastically modified and we are quite happy about it.”
However, Alpine has had numerous issues in testing with the A424, with the team facing turbo issues, oil and water leaks as well as an electrical problem during the 30-hour endurance test at Motorland Aragon. This meant they did not achieve their objective of 5400km during the test, although the car did run without issues for eight hours.
Alpine will launch its car on 7th February, together with the 2024 Alpine Formula 1 car, but there is more co-operation between the F1 and WEC programmes than solely marketing, according to the 39-year-old.
“The launch is going to be on the 7th, and it’s the first time the Formula 1 and the Hypercar will be together,” said Lapierre.
“So that’s great. And Alpine is on one of the very, very few teams doing these two championships which are very high level.
“Of course we try to find synergy, mainly on the powertrain, hybrid and the engine. The team from Alpine Racing and Viry-Châtillon are working hard on the Hypercar project as well and there is also a small synergy with Formula E.
“So all together they try to get the most of the knowledge from inside Alpine Racing, to help us to move as fast as possible in this project, but this is mainly on the power train,” he concluded.
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