Background
The esteemed Alpine marque has its origins in the rallying adventures of one Jean Rédélé. Rédélé was the son of a Renault concessionaire in Dieppe, northern France. Rédélé senior found himself imprisoned by the occupying forces during World War II for his refusal to collaborate. As a result, Jean Rédélé took the helm of the dealership in 1946. He was just 24 years old making him the youngest Renault dealer principle in the network. In order to promote the family dealership which had been ravaged by six years of war and occupation, Jean Rédélé went rallying. He initially campaigned a Renault 4CV and scored his first victory in the Dieppe to Rouen Rally of 1950. He would soon be competing in the Coupe des Alpes and, in 1954, he secured his first win in the gruelling mountain stages.
No wonder then that when he established a company to build lightweight, Renault based sports cars in 1955 he named it Alpine. Working in collaboration with carrosserie Chappe et Gessalin, Rédélé launched the 4CV based A106 in Alpine’s inaugural year. The aerodynamic styling was the work of none other than Giovanni Michelotti and, like all Alpines to follow, the sleek fibreglass body clothed a rigid tubular backbone. The A108 would follow in 1958 and be based on Dauphine Gordini underpinnings. Whilst more modern than the 4CV the Dauphine was not exactly cutting edge so when the Renault 8 was released in 1962, Alpine set about building a sports car around it. This car would become the A110 Berlinette – or coupe – which was released in 1963.
The super lightweight and diminutive A110 became a sporting sensation and true icon of the European rally stages by the late 1960’s. This was so much the case, indeed, that in 1968 Renault allocated their whole competition budget to Alpine. What’s more they agreed to let Alpines be sold and maintained via the regular Renault dealership network – a real boon for the marque’s road cars. The endgame of this increasingly close relationship came in 1973 when Renault took a 70% stake in Alpine. In 1976 Alpine was rolled up with Gordini to become Renault Sport, thereby consolidating their motorsport and performance engineering efforts to great effect.
As early as 1951 a Spanish industrialist, Manuel Jimenez Alfaro, had been building 4CVs under license in his Valladolid factory in Spain under his Fabrication de Automobiles SA (FASA) umbrella. By 1965 Renault had taken full control of the operation and in January 1967 the Spanish A110 was born. Featuring the 1108cc engine these were almost identical to those being built in Dieppe at the time. In April 1971 the 1289cc, V85 engined cars were launched with production running until October 1976. Indeed the world’s last A110 Berlinette was built by FASA in 1978 to bring the total of Spanish built cars to just 1566.
