The Alpine A110-50 Concept Could Have Led to a Very Different A110

The revived Alpine A110, perhaps the most singularly brilliant sports car of its generation, has just a couple of months left to live in its current form before production winds up for good and it’s replaced by an all-electric successor.

This, naturally, has us feeling a little wistful, and looking back to the 2010s. Back then, Renault’s resurrection of the Alpine brand, dormant for nearly two decades, was one of the biggest ongoing stories in the European car industry, but the car that first teased it – 2012’s Renault Alpine A110-50 concept – looked very different to the A110 we’d eventually get.

In the years between Alpine’s demise in 1995 and its eventual return to showrooms in 2017, there were several abandoned efforts to bring it back. Renault touted the brand’s rebirth as early as 2007, but the economic crisis of the following year put paid to those plans. With the economy recovering into the new decade, though, a revival was quickly back on the table, and Renault kicked it up a gear with a 2012 concept celebrating 50 years since the debut of the original A110 – the aptly-named Alpine A110-50.

While the eventual new A110 would be heavily influenced by the original in both styling and philosophy, the A110-50 hinted at a very different direction. For starters, it wasn’t solely an Alpine, but a Renault Alpine – the Renault diamond shared space with the slanted Alpine ‘A’, and the styling was very clearly Renault’s, with an overall language shared with cars like the fourth-gen Clio launched the same year. Arguably only the yellow-tinted LED ring lights up front provided a direct styling link back to the original A110.

It was fundamentally different underneath, too. While the A110 we got was based around a bespoke aluminium chassis and launched with a 249bhp four-pot turbo engine, the A110-50 concept was a lot more hardcore – it was, essentially, a racing car.

Its chassis and engine came wholesale from the Megane Trophy racer, which had about as much to do with an actual Megane as you do with a fish. It had a tubular chassis which cradled a 400bhp, 3.5-litre V6. Renault called this engine the V4Y, but thanks to the Renault-Nissan alliance, this was little more than a rebranding of a Nissan engine – the VQ35 from the 350Z. It sent that power to the rear wheels via a six-speed semi-auto gearbox, while full carbon bodywork helped keep kerbweight down to just 880kg.

The A110-50, a fully functioning car, popped up at several events over the summer of 2012, including the Monaco Grand Prix and Goodwood Festival of Speed, but at that point, Renault had yet to fully commit to relaunching the Alpine brand. That finally changed in November that year, when the announcement came that the company was teaming up with Caterham to co-develop a new sports car under the Alpine name.

That deal would sadly fall apart in 2014, robbing us of a Caterham-badged, manual-gearboxed sibling to the Alpine, but happily, Renault saw fit to carry on alone, eventually resulting in the A110 we know and love today hitting production in 2017.

Now, nine years on, production of that wonderful car is finally coming to an end, but Alpine’s range and sales have grown exponentially with cars like the A290 and A390. While both the new A110 and the Alpine brand as a whole would ultimately go in a slightly different direction, the A110-50 concept remains a fascinating look at what could have been.