The wrath of the mayor of Viry-Châtillon against the Renault Group: “Lies and betrayal”

Possible exit from WEC as well?

It was September 2024 when the Renault Group decided to end the development of the Formula 1 engine at the Viry-Châtillon plant, where the French team would nonetheless continue its ‘Hypertech Alpine’ project, so named for its commitment to the WEC with the A424 LMDh. However, after entering in 2015, in recent weeks rumors have become increasingly insistent about a possible exit of Alpine from this championship as well at the end of the upcoming season, caused by the change of Renault’s CEO that took place last summer (from Luca de Meo to François Provost).

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Rumors that have infuriated the mayor of Viry-Châtillon and regional councilor of Île-de-France, Jean-Marie Vilain, who in a post on his social profiles expressed his indignation at the “lies and betrayal” by the Renault Group.

Going into more detail, Vilain published a press release: “The city of Viry-Châtillon, in collaboration with Alpine staff representatives, had taken note of the Renault group’s decision, announced on September 30, 2024, at the Social and Economic Committee, to end the development of the F1 engine at the Alpine plant in Viry-Châtillon. Despite the great disappointment, as this meant the end of a beautiful adventure that had brought France to the forefront thanks to the numerous world titles achieved, the city, as well as Alpine employees, had shown a sense of responsibility by also taking note of the Renault group’s desire to create an engineering center of excellence called Hypertech Alpine, which was supposed to carry out the projects for the future Alpine Supercar, the development of a hydrogen engine, taking responsibility for the development of future batteries, new electric motor technologies, the motorsport program, participating in the WEC and the Paris-Dakar rally. A monitoring committee was established, under the aegis of the Essonne prefecture, which met twice, on October 8, 2024, and March 5, 2025, in the presence of the prefect, Alpine executives, and myself, to follow the creation of this future center of excellence and innovation replacing the F1 engine development center. While we wished to reconvene this monitoring committee to take stock of the situation, after the arrival at the end of July 2025 of the new Renault executive, François Provost, following the departure of Luca De Meo, it was to my great astonishment to learn that Renault was reneging on its commitments regarding the Alpine site, which it is expected to announce during a corporate social committee on February 12. It is simply scandalous because it ignores all the commitments that had been made and reaffirmed to the city and employees during the two previous monitoring committees. It is even more incomprehensible as Renault was starting to achieve good results with a first historic victory for the A424 in the WEC at the 6 Hours of Fuji last September and a victory a few days ago at the Dakar. Recall that the group announced an increase of nearly 7% in its turnover in the third quarter of 2025. I therefore appeal to the responsibility of the Renault group executives so that the commitments made are respected, as well as to the intervention of the State which, as the majority shareholder of this group, has the duty to intervene to ensure respect for the word given and its employees“.

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