That is the kind of wait that tests a soul in motorsport. Philippe Sinault had to endure 343 days without seeing his Alpine Endurance Team climb back onto a rostrum in the FIA World Endurance Championship, left waiting ever since their milestone triumph at Fuji in 2025. But the drought finally broke in Texas earlier this month, where both of the brand's A424 Hypercars locked down top-five finishes at Lone Star Le Mans for the very first time.
From the opening free practice laps at the Circuit of The Americas, the French prototypes showed blistering pace. Charles Milesi and Victor Martins put their speed on full display by qualifying third and sixth respectively in Hyperpole, running comfortably within the lead group all afternoon. When the dust settled in Texas, Les Bleus walked away with a stellar haul of 25 points, second only to the tally managed by Ferrari thanks to Antonio Giovinazzi claiming pole position. It was a long-overdue conversion of raw speed into silverware.
I'm not being falsely modest when I say that we're capable of repeating at Fuji what we achieved at Austin,
Yet the near-misses will sting for a while. The #35 machine crossed the line just 1.116 seconds behind the race-winning #50 Ferrari 499P, having lost crucial ground when Milesi slipped off-track in traffic, picking up debris that took two laps to clean and cost an eight-second loss. After briefly inheriting second following a dramatic hydraulic failure for the leading #7 Toyota TR010 HYBRID, that same #35 crew was slapped with a five-second penalty for an unsafe release, ultimately dropping them to third behind the #38 Cadillac V-Series. R.
Meanwhile, the #36 crew saw a potential result evaporate when they pitted a single lap before a Virtual Safety Car. That mistimed stop plunged them down to 12th, though Martins put on a masterclass of a final stint to slice his way past five rivals on track. Sinault captured the unforgiving nature of the championship bluntly: a mere eight and five seconds lost over a six-hour race is the difference between glory and heartache. If you sneeze, you drop three places.
Now, the paddock moves on to the 6 Hours of Fuji, where Alpine arrives on famously fertile ground. Mount Fuji overlooks a monstrous 1.475km main straight—the second-longest on the entire WEC calendar—and the team returns as defending victors from last year's triumph with Milesi, Paul-Loup Chatin, and Ferdinand Habsburg. Sinault makes no secret of his intentions for the weekend, insisting the team has reached a maturity in its Hypercar programme where fighting at the absolute front is the new baseline expectation.
"I'm not being falsely modest when I say that we're capable of repeating at Fuji what we achieved at Austin," Sinault states. After three hard years of development, the Dieppe-based manufacturer believes its A424 beast is finally a consistent threat for overall victories. Staying at the summit is notoriously harder than climbing it, but the French squad intends to prove in Japan that they are built to stay.
