Driving An Alpine A110 S To Le Mans Was The Perfect Goodbye

By all rights, a several-hour-long motorway slog should be the last thing on earth the Alpine A110 is good at. It’s designed to carve up corners, not sit at cruising speed, mixing it with articulated lorries and high beam-blaring A6s and 5 Series.

And yet, as soon as I’ve pulled onto the M62 near Hull, all is well in my little capsule of Gallic lightness. The A110’s fizzy engine has died back to a distant drone as it sits in seventh gear, the cruise control is doing its thing, a near-midsummer sun is still high in the sky even in the early evening, and I’ve got a ridiculously cheesy ’80s power rock playlist blasting from the stereo. Life, at this particular moment, is good.

It stays good for the next few hours, as the late-ish hour means I get a rare traffic-free run across the Dartford Bridge, the high-rises of Canary Wharf backlit by the setting sun a few miles to my right. Tonight’s destination, a hotel in Folkestone, is just over an hour away.

It’s a little under two days until the 2025 24 Hours of Le Mans, and we’ve borrowed an A110 for the run down there. There are a couple of reasons for this – firstly, because when Alpine says ‘do you to drive down to Le Mans in an A110?’, there’s only really one acceptable answer.

But there is another, more poignant reason. The current A110 – the first, and for some years, only car in the lineup of the reborn Alpine brand – has been around for eight years now. During that time, it’s built up a small but enthusiastic following, who love it for its rejection of brute force and its embrace of lightness and delicacy.

But in February of this year, we heard the news we’d been dreading: the A110 was entering its final year of production. In 2026, it’ll be waved off, to be replaced (not uncontroversially) by an electric successor.

Living with one for a week or so, then, including for a 1000-odd mile round trip from Yorkshire to Le Mans and back again, seemed like the perfect opportunity to not only say our goodbyes to this sensational little car, but to properly dig into whether there’s more to it than just its fantastic handling.

Our car is an A110 S, so as well as an extra helping of power – 296bhp versus the base car’s 249 – it has a stiffer suspension setup and reworked steering. I’d worried that this might chip away at some of the delicacy and fluidity that I’d loved so much in the absolute basest of base model cars I once spent a few days with, and indeed, the S is noticeably jigglier and firmer over broken surfaces.

It’s still a world away from the bone-crunching ride found in lots of modern performance cars, though, and anyway, once you’re out onto the unblemished roads of northern France, you could be in an actual GT3 race car and not notice any imperfections.

To hit those roads, I’m up early – like really, horribly early – and on a LeShuttle train filled with a curious mix of stickered-up sports cars en route to Le Mans and crossovers full of bleary-eyed families getting an early start to maximise their days at Disneyland.

Once I’ve popped out the other side and found the nearest espresso, the obvious choice would be to hit the A16 and head southwest, but I take a look at Google Maps and find a temptingly wiggly yellow line that snakes along the coast towards Cap Gris-Nez. I’m a bit ahead of schedule, the roads are practically deserted, and I’m in an A110. You just would, wouldn’t you?

Here, the little Alpine is sensational as ever. Especially with the S’ extra helping of power and slightly tightened-up steering, it's a perfect demonstration of the virtues of giving you everything you need and nothing more.

The gearbox is crisp and immediate in its responses, the 1.8-litre turbo four, with its raspy tone and engineered-in pop-pop-pops, is as soulful as you can really hope an engine like this to be, and the steering is flick-of-the-wrist light but still offers lots of feedback. It feels as close to being perfectly set up for these winding roads as any car could be.

But enough larking about. I’ve got places to be. Onto the Autoroute, cruise control on, and time to settle in for the near 250-mile stint to Le Mans. And once again, I’m a little bit in awe of how the Alpine takes it in its stride.

Most modern sports cars with kerbweights hovering around the one-tonne mark would leave you with ringing ears and a shattered spine, but the A110 just doesn’t. It’s not a Bentley, obviously, but it just sits there at 130kph, while I’m ensconced in my little cabin, chilled by the air-con and hooked up to CarPlay. Its little engine and light touch mean MPG in the mid-30s is doable, even if you’re not really trying (although its 45-litre thimble of a fuel tank means fuel stops are a bit more frequent than I’d like).

On these quiet Autoroutes with their well-signed speed cameras, the only thing that really keeps you on your toes is an encounter with a lumbering articulated lorry – the A110 is so light-footed, that as you pass them, it does a little shimmy as it’s disturbed by their wake. It’s like trying to take off in a Cessna 172 moments after an Airbus A380 has departed the same runway.

I hit Le Mans at around midday. Even though I’ve already been up about eight hours, most of them on the road, I’m feeling remarkably fresh, testament to just how well the little A110 takes whatever you ask of it in its stride.

Mind you, the same can’t be said for the members of our group who’d been given the hardcore A110 R. It mercifully still has air-con – handy when the temperature's on the verge of beginning with a three – but looking at the snug carbon buckets and six-point harnesses, any jealousy I might have harboured towards their lovely carbon aerodisc wheels quickly vanishes.

The R, though, has never really shown the A110 in the best light. I’d always thought the standard car did, but having done such big miles in the S, I’m not so sure anymore. It’s moot anyway, because for 2025, it’s been superseded by the GTS, pairing the S’s mechanical upgrades with a slightly plusher interior. Could well be the best of the bunch, that.

It’ll all be moot soon if you’re looking to buy new. Alpine is making lots of promising noises about the A110’s all-electric replacement, but however good or otherwise it turns out, it’ll inevitably be a bigger, heavier thing than the outgoing car. And for long distances, a hidden talent of the car, petrol still reigns supreme.

Alpine told us at Le Mans that, thanks to the French government’s punishing tax on bigger-engined cars, the A110 now has 98 per cent of the coupe market in its home country. Even though the UK (along with Germany) is one of the other two biggest markets for the car, it’s always felt like a much more niche prospect here.

Maybe that’s because of its little engine, or its lack of available manual gearbox. If you ask Alpine itself, it’s because it looks a bit ‘froggy’ and lacks the visual aggression British buyers want. Whatever the reason, it’s a crying shame, because there’s a serious lack of cleverly-engineered cars like this left on sale, ones that really lay bare the benefits of keeping the weight down.

So, thank you, A110. We’re really, really going to miss you, and a big road trip like this reminds us why. Hopefully, the end of production will spur an uptick in sales as it so often does with niche models like this – you really don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.