Alpine was a dismal, distant last in Formula 1 in 2025, with some small consolation in that it is the best worst team in F1 history.
No team has ever finished last while scoring as many points as Alpine, even though it finished 48 points behind the next-lowest team, Sauber.
And while its car was just about the slowest on average, the Alpine wasn't irredeemably bad, as its qualifying results show.
Pierre Gasly's record of 11 Q3 appearances meant Alpine made it to the final part of qualifying at almost half the races. Plus its single-lap pace deficit of just under 1.4% is the smallest of the 21st century for the slowest car on the grid.
This has continued a trend of F1's teams getting better and better across the board of late. F1 has become a much more sustainable and competitive environment with the cost cap, tighter technical regulations, and limits on aerodynamic testing.
The 'worst' is always relative, and Alpine's version is the most competent a team in that position's ever been. But there's also a slightly strange contrast to note as well. Alpine also achieved a historical first given it actually 'secured' last place in the championship before the last race of the season.
Previously, any team rooted to the bottom of the points either had one or more others who were almost as bad or at least had the vague mathematical possibility of a freak result launching them up the table. Alpine was so far off that even a 1-2 finish in Abu Dhabi wouldn't have moved it above anyone else.
Ultimately, in the closest F1 season in years in terms of pace covering the 10 teams, and an ultra-competitive midfield, Alpine's drivers just spent too many races without the machinery required to fight over a full race distance.
Gasly scored 100% of the team's 22 points, amassed across just six weekends out of 24. This was barely a third of Alpine's 2024 total - 65 points - and just 12.7% of what it scored as recently as 2022, when it was the fourth-best team. That fall from grace has been rapid.
Of course, there are reasons for this. Switching full focus so early to 2026 meant the inherent problems with the car, a hangover from 2024, were never going to be fully addressed. And there was a bigger step from rivals than Alpine expected.
So it could pay off next year. It has to. Because this is a real low point for Renault as the works team finished in last place for the first time in the French manufacturer's F1 history.
Even in its first year back in 2016, when Renault had repurchased a beleaguered and underfunded Team Enstone late the previous year and amassed a woeful eight points, there were still two teams (Sauber and Manor) that finished behind.
It has never been good enough for a manufacturer of this size to spend a decade or so bouncing around the midfield with differing degrees of success. But it's never been as bad as in 2025 and the decline across the ground effect era has been sharp.
It is so easy to forget that Alpine bested McLaren on merit just three years ago, beating it to fourth in the championship in the first year of the new rules. The fact McLaren has charged on to winning championships in this era, while Alpine has gone in the complete opposite direction, is the ultimate example of its missed opportunity and how disastrously it's been managed.
Flavio Briatore's inglorious return has led Alpine to the bottom but it would be unfair to pin that solely on him. The Alpine era has been a backwards step, with the calamitously interfering leadership of Laurent Rossi, and of course ex-Renault CEO Luca de Meo pulling the strings. He was ultimately responsible for this omnishambles until the summer of 2025, even though he and his sycophants never acted like it.
A grand ambition is still being trumpeted in the short-term, as Briatore wants Alpine to be fighting for podiums as a Mercedes customer from 2026 onwards and then to start aiming for victories soon after.
Optimism's great, but it has to be rooted in reality. And Alpine's is sobering.
To fall from best of the rest to dead last in three years was a miserable way to end Alpine's time as a works team, given Renault's F1 engine programme has been canned ahead of the new 2026 rules.
That is a decision that the powers-that-be have gambled Alpine's entire competitive credentials on. And it will surely be an improvement because...how could it be worse?
