Alpine is quite possibly the sports car company of the moment. Recently revived by fellow French automaker Renault, their upcoming A110 is a compact mid-engine Porsche Cayman rival that leverages the venerable expertise of the Renault Sport division to bring forth a - according to some early impressions - rather breathtakingly agile car.
But you most likely are already well aware of all this, that is at least if you’ve been aware enough of the car’s journey from conception toward production. However, Alpine, along with their fitting financial and technical benefactors, have a wider latitude of plans, and one such extension is a single-make race series featuring their new A110.
It would mark the return of a possible ‘Alpine Cup’ series too, which was last seen in the 1980s and used a similar single-make setup featuring a grid Renault Alpine GTAs. Renault is currently involved in several forms of single-seat racing series such as the multiple tiers of Formula Renault along with, of course, running the Renault Sport F1 team while also being the series’ 3rd-largest engine supplier.
Granted, at this precise moment, details do remain quite scarce as the most we have to go on is a sketch that shows the front of a race-prepared blue A110 poking out of a pit garage. Purportedly, the grid will compose of 20 cars with races taking place all over Europe. Signatec, known for their work in the LMP2-class endurance racing series, has been tapped to design and build these ‘A110 Cup’ cars.
Aside from the requisite safety-specific and mechanical modifications, these cars aren’t expected to differ too much from the standard production version. Weight will be reduced, naturally, possibly trimming the 1,100kg car to a shade under 1 tonne.
The 1.8-litre turbocharged four-cylinder petrol motor could have its output reduced from the stock 187kW as well as having some internal components swapped out for stronger ones for increased longevity. For packaging constraints, though, it isn’t likely that the 7-speed dual-clutch EDC transmission will see any major alterations.
It isn’t clear how far into the process Alpine are in actually setting up the new series, but a possible path could be to coincide with the wide release of the production A110 in early 2018.
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