Alpine brings back Mike Elliott as technical chief

Alpine has appointed former Mercedes technical chief Mike Elliott as its new chief technical officer.

The Renault-owned Formula 1 team confirmed the hire on 17 September 2026 Reuters. Elliott is 52. He will start work next week at the team's factory in Enstone, Oxfordshire.

Elliott will lead and oversee the technical and engineering functions at Enstone, where Alpine designs and builds its grand prix car. He will sit above executive technical director David Sanchez, who joined Alpine in May 2024 BBC Sport. The wider team is run by managing director Steve Nielsen as effective team principal, with Flavio Briatore acting as executive adviser and de facto boss.

Elliott began his Formula 1 career at McLaren in 2000 as an aerodynamicist, a specialist in how air flows over the car to help it stick to the track. He later became principal aerodynamicist at Renault and Lotus, the Enstone teams that came before Alpine, from 2008 to 2012. That earlier spell means he knows the factory, its people and its way of working. It was his first leadership role in car design.

He then spent more than a decade at Mercedes, first as head of aerodynamics and later as technical director and then chief technical officer. He left Mercedes in October 2023. His move to Alpine is his return to Formula 1 after that departure Formula1.com.

Alpine listed the news on its official press site as ‘Mike Elliott joins BWT Alpine Formula One Team as Chief Technical Officer’. A chief technical officer sets the technical direction, while an executive technical director looks after the detail of the current car. Enstone is the organisation that has to turn those decisions into lap time.

For fans, this means Alpine now has a clear technical ladder. Elliott brings long experience from the front of the grid and a previous stint at Enstone. The test will be how fast that combination can move the car forward.