CarBrandLogos archive · Alpine · 1963
A glassfibre featherweight that beat the factory teams to the first world rally title.
Discover the storyPhoto: Lothar Spurzem · CC BY-SA 2.0 de
The story
Explore the ideas, engineering and context that shaped the Alpine A110, then continue into its specifications and place in the marque's lineage.
01
Alpine's Berlinette looks like a scaled-down 1960s sports car and behaves like something far more specialised. The recipe was inherited from the A108: a steel backbone chassis, a glassfibre body bolted to it, and a Renault engine hung out behind the rear axle driving the rear wheels through a five-speed gearbox. What changed between 1963 and 1977 was every detail of the execution.
Paris - Retromobile 2012 - Renault Alpine - 021 · Thesupermat · CC BY-SA 3.0
02
Rear weight bias in a short, very light car is a difficult trait to manage and a devastating one once managed. The A110 put its mass over the driven wheels, which made it exceptional on loose surfaces and in snow, and its small frontal area and low weight meant that engines of 1.0 to 1.3 litres from Renault's Cleon-Fonte family, and later 1.5 to 1.65-litre Cleon-Alu units, were enough to do the job. Michelotti's body, with its curved screen and long tail, barely changed in fourteen years.
Alpine GT 4 · jean-pierre 60;Levels adjusted, cropped by uploader Mr.choppers · CC BY-SA 3.0
03
The rally record made the reputation. Alpine won the Monte Carlo Rally in 1971 with Ove Andersson and again in 1973 with Jean-Claude Andruet, filling the podium on the second occasion, and in 1973 took the first World Rally Championship title for manufacturers against works efforts from Fiat, Ford and Lancia. That the winning car came from a small firm in a Normandy port town, built around parts from Renault's saloon range, was not lost on anyone at the time.
04
Renault took financial control of Alpine in 1973, which changed the company's character permanently. The A110 was also assembled under licence abroad, including in Spain by FASA-Renault, in Mexico and in Bulgaria, which is why survivors surface in unexpected places.
05
The A310 replaced it from 1971, though the two overlapped for years, and the oil crisis and increasingly professional works teams ended its competitive life. Alpine returned to the name in 2017 for a mid-engined revival that borrowed the proportions and the philosophy while sharing no parts at all.
06
Original cars are now expensive and usually restored to a standard tidier than they left Dieppe with. What is worth remembering is how little the A110 had to work with: a pushrod engine from a family saloon, a body made of plastic, and an engineer's insistence that if the car is light enough, nothing else has to be excessive.
At a glance
Produced
1963–1977Engine
1.0&ndashDesigner
Giovanni MichelottiBody
2-door BerlinetteTechnical specification
Badge at launch
This is the marque emblem that accompanied the A110's era. The full identity timeline is documented in the brand archive.
Explore the logo history →Lineage
Contemporaries from the 1960s
Spotted something wrong on this page? Send us the correction — with a source, and we will fix it. How this site is written.
