Detour #85: An Alpine Adventure, France
Sim Mainey
The history of French sports car brand Alpine traces a fascinating geographical path taking in race tracks, a soirée in Paris and epic mountain passes to create one hell of a road trip, as Dan Trent reveals.
What motivated a Renault dealer from a seaside town in northern France to create his own sports car brand and name it after a region many hundreds of kilometres away? Put simply, epic roads and the inspirational quality of driving them.
Accordingly, this road trip is inspired by the life of Alpine founder Jean Rédélé and his exploits as a carmaker, entrepreneur and successful competitor in both racing and rallying. Many of the calling points along the way are perhaps predictable. Some are borderline cliché. But the sequence in which we’re tackling them is the story of both a man and the car brand he created.
It starts in Dieppe. Motorsport took Rédélé around Europe and inspired his life’s work but he was loyal to his hometown and, from the bust on the roundabout next to the factory to the random A110 mounted to another on the outskirts, he is clearly celebrated locally.
Heading south, the first diversion is the twisting little road circuit of Rouen-Les-Essarts, the course of which is easy to trace in the woods outside the town. Rédélé raced in his tuned-up Renault 4CV here, before upping his game to drive at Le Mans. Which, predictably enough, is where our journey takes us next, the novelty of being able to drive large portions of the famous circuit on the public road one that never wears thin.
East to Paris is a chance to call by Alpine’s head office, close to the Île Seguin on the Seine where Renault once had its main factory and Rédélé presented three of his new coupes in blue, white and red in a bold pitch for his little venture to the company’s top brass. Suffice to say, it worked and the partnership endures to this day.
The stop at Reims is predictable but valid, given Alpine’s delicate looking, Gordini-engined racing prototypes competed successfully on the flat-out blasts around this famous road circuit. Now preserved, the white-washed pits and grandstands tower over the rolling agricultural plains and are a justly iconic visit for any passing petrolhead.
This is all just a warm-up for the main event, of course. The original plan had been to follow the route of the epic Alpine Rally that attracted drivers from all over Europe, British success including Ian Appleyard in his Jaguar XK120 and Pat Moss in her Healey. Rédélé was among them, winning the celebrated Coupe des Alpes and developing his own car into a rally-winning machine built for mountain passes. “I thoroughly enjoyed crossing the Alps in my Renault 4CV,” Rédélé said, “and that gave me the idea of calling my future cars ‘Alpines’, so that my customers would experience that same driving pleasure.”
Taking in the full route is a nice idea but there simply isn’t the time. Hence an Alpine Rally ‘greatest hits’ of some of the most iconic passes on which the drivers did battle back in the day. Suffice to say, a few squiggles on the map do not do justice to the scale of even this seemingly modest itinerary.
The Jura provides a nice warm-up before the Col du Grand St Bernard, the scenic route over the top meaning you leave the plodding trucks to the tunnel under the summit and its charming lakeside border crossing into Italy. From Aosta it’s up the other side of the valley and over the more scenic Petit St Bernard, the lush meadows and forests providing a gentler panorama than its big brother.
South through Val d’Isère and it gets real with the Col d’Iseran. Here the modern A110 still carries Rédélé’s influence, its Megane-sourced engine punching hard in a lightweight aluminium spaceframe, the lack of kilos meaning the suspension can be tuned for both poise and composure, even on frost-scarred Alpine tarmac. It pivots round the hairpins daintily, the compact size perfectly suited to the narrower roads and filling you with confidence, even with the unguarded death drops beside them.
The scenery is nothing less than breathtaking as another series of hairpins twists to the valley floor blast to Briançon via the Col du Mont Cenis. Here a ‘for the hell of it’ loop down the valley and back up and over the Col d’Izoard takes in another popular fixture of the Alpine Rally route that Rédélé would have driven back in the day before we head north over formidable Galibier, its rawness and exposure as close to what to the drivers would have tackled back in the 50s and 60s as we’ve yet tasted. Saying that the surface is no longer gravel as it would have been back then and we’ve got modern lights and brakes but it’s still an intimidating drive in the dark.
Time is against us and from here it’s back onto the péage north and a return ferry. As a journey of discovery into what inspired Alpine then and now it’s been a fantastic drive. It also goes to show that away from the more popular passes and the crawl of holiday traffic there are lesser-known ones where you get the freedom and headspace to really appreciate the landscape and roads to the full. One day we’ll be back to really do the Alpine Rally route properly. For now this is quite the appetiser.
Words Dan Trent Twitter | Instagram
Photography Sim Mainey Instagram
