Here's the thing about endurance racing: you can run the show for nearly the entire afternoon, lead for almost 80 per cent of the distance, and still walk away feeling completely gutted. That was the harsh reality for the Alpine Endurance Team at the 6 Hours of Fuji, where a stunning weekend ended with a second-place finish that somehow felt both like a triumph and a bitter pill.
The Alpine A424 was an absolute beast in Japan from the very first session. Standout series rookie Victor Martins topped the timesheets in the dry of Friday's FP2 and the wet of FP3 the next morning. When deteriorating conditions forced qualifying to be called off, the grid was set by the fastest laps from practice. That put the #36 machine shared by Martins and Jules Gounon on pole position—the very first for the A424 in the FIA World Endurance Championship—with the sister #35 entry of Charles Milesi and Ferdinand Habsburg locking out the front row in style.
When the lights went green, Gounon and Habsburg controlled the opening stint on slick tyres as a 72,326-strong crowd watched them pull away from the chasing pack. Even after a succession of neutralisations wiped out their gaps, the striking blue prototypes routinely re-asserted their dominance. Martins had a brief scare with a Turn One overshoot on cold tyres, and Habsburg made light contact with Toyota’s Nyck de Vries, yet the #36 continued leading the #35 with a healthy margin over everyone else.
Then came the turning point with just under an hour remaining, when an LMGT3 accident brought out the safety car. As the field pitted for a final splash of fuel, the race flipped upside down. The #8 Toyota rolled the dice by taking no tyres and short-fuelling, while the #15 BMW also jumped ahead. The #35 rejoined in third, but the #36 plummeted all the way from first to fifth.
Following barrier repairs, the race resumed with a frantic 20-minute sprint to the flag. Martins dropped the hammer on fresh Michelin boots, slicing past Aston Martin’s Marco Sørensen before Milesi sportingly waved his teammate by into third. Dries Vanthoor put up a fierce defence in second until a mistake at Turn Six released the Frenchman to chase down Ryō Hirakawa in the lead. Martins threw everything at it, crossing the finish line a mere 0.591 seconds behind the Toyota, while Milesi secured fourth just 1.284 seconds off the podium.
It marks the best joint result of the A424 era, following up on third and fifth places at COTA three weeks earlier, and lifts Alpine past Cadillac into fourth in the Manufacturers’ World Championship standings. They now sit less than 20 points shy of Ferrari in third with just two rounds remaining, starting in Barcelona on 16-18 October. Team Principal Philippe Sinault summed up the collective mood best: after being disappointed with third and fifth in Austin, feeling gutted over second and fourth at Fuji proves the team is building real momentum.
