Alpine sit P5 in the 2026 constructors' championship after Miami, 23 points on the board and zero wins, which is a sentence nobody in Enstone would have written with a straight face this time last year. The regulation reset was supposed to either vault this team forward or expose them. Through four rounds, somehow, it's done a little of both.
Miami was the clearest snapshot yet. Franco Colapinto out-qualified Pierre Gasly and drove to P7, a career-best finish and the kind of opportunistic afternoon Alpine has spent two seasons waiting on. Gasly, the steady hand who had carried 16 of the team's points across the first three rounds, ended his Sunday inverted in the barriers after contact with Liam Lawson — a DNF that flips the internal narrative for the first time in a long while.
The off-track noise is louder than the on-track gap to the teams around them. Oliver Oakes resigned 48 hours after Miami. Flavio Briatore now runs the operation. Jack Doohan is out, Colapinto is in for the rest of the season on a five-race audition, and an Argentine demonstration run pulled 600,000 fans for a country that hasn't had a grand prix hero since Fangio.
What to watch at Imola: whether Colapinto turns Miami into momentum, whether Gasly resets after the heaviest off of his season, and whether Briatore's first proper race weekend at the wheel of this team produces a coherent direction or just more turbulence.