Alpine A110

Overview

Jean Rédélé ran a Renault dealership in Dieppe and spent his weekends rallying modified 4CVs through the Alps, which is the whole company in one sentence: ordinary Renault parts, extraordinary lightness, mountain roads. The A110 berlinette is where the recipe came good. Shown as a prototype at the 1962 Paris Salon and on sale the following summer, it bonded a fiberglass body to a steel backbone chassis and hung a small Renault four behind the rear axle. The first cars made do with 956cc and barely more than 50 horsepower; the engine bay kept accepting bigger Renault fours until the 1600S arrived with the aluminium R16 unit, twin Webers and a 210 km/h top speed, in a car weighing roughly 700 kilograms. Rallying made it a national hero. The berlinette swept the Monte Carlo podium in 1971 and again in 1973, the year Alpine took the first World Rally Championship for makes ever awarded. Dieppe built 7,176 of them before the line stopped in July 1977, with license-built cars adding more in Spain, Mexico and Bulgaria, and forty years later Renault thought enough of the little car to bring the name, the shape and the idea back to life.

Distinctions

The defining attributes and collector status that make this car garage-worthy.

Legend

A car that transcended the hobby, known far beyond the people who drive them.

Poster Car

The car on the bedroom wall, the one people dreamed about before they could drive.

Octane Files Select

Renowned for its history, engineering, or cultural weight.

Collectibility scorecard

Rated 1 to 10 on the traits that matter for owning, driving, and holding on to a car like this.

Desirability

8/10

Rarity

7/10

Driving thrill

8/10

Investment trajectory

7/10

Usability

4/10

Ease of restoration

4/10

Cultural impact

7/10

Electronic dependence

Fully analogHeavily electronic

Carburetted Renault fours, points ignition and simple charging; throttle, brakes and steering are all rod, cable or plain hydraulic, with no computer anywhere in the car. The short-lived fuel-injected 1600SI of the mid seventies is the family's only electronic system of note.

Market data

Demand tier, price trend, and typical values by condition. Our own assessment, not a quoted valuation.

Demand tier

EntrySolidHighBlue-chip

Strong, sustained collector demand. Good examples never wait long for a buyer.

Value trajectory

AppreciatingStableCooling

Values are holding steady. What you pay today is what it's worth tomorrow.

Price by condition

Driver

$60k

Excellent

$95k

Concours

$140k

Classic.com's running average for first-generation cars sits around $93,000, with the recorded high a $241,250 sale in January 2026; 1600S examples regularly bring six figures while 1300s and V85s trade below the model average. The band here describes the four-cylinder volume cars; 1600S, works and Group 4 machinery price above it, and license-built Dinalpin and FASA cars typically below.

Values as of July 2026.

Buyer's guide

What anyone seriously considering this car should know first.

Why it's worth it

The 700kg berlinette that beat Porsche, Lancia and Ford to the inaugural World Rally Championship

Callout

Winner of the first ever World Rally Championship in 1973: 147 points, 63 clear of Fiat

What to watch for

Everything important hides where the fiberglass meets the steel. The backbone chassis is stout, but it lives under a bonded body that never rusts, so a shiny A110 can be standing on a rotten spine. Get the car on a lift: check the central tube, the outriggers, and every point where glass fibre laps over metal, because trapped moisture does its quiet work there for decades, and serious chassis repair means separating body from frame, which is specialist money. The second job is identity. Alpine built the car in a run of factory types with their own codes, VA through VH, and the value gap between a real 1600S and a 1300 wearing 1600S badges is wide enough that verification matters; the clubs and marque specialists can decode chassis and engine numbers, and a car with its history in order earns every bit of its premium. Period rally use is common and honourable, but look hard for tired, stress-cracked fibreglass and crash repairs done fast between stages. The mechanical side is the easy part: engines and gearboxes are shared with the Renault 8 Gordini, 12 and 16, and nothing in the drivetrain should frighten anyone.

The Story

Driving character

Everything about the A110 follows from two numbers: roughly 700 kilograms, and an engine slung behind the rear axle. Traction out of a hairpin is enormous, which is exactly why the car worked on ice and gravel, and the unassisted steering chatters with the kind of information only a very light car can send. You sit almost on the floor, feet ahead of you in a narrow footwell, the wheel close, the glass low; the car feels painted on rather than climbed into. A twin-Weber 1600S snarls and spits behind your head and pulls harder than its figures suggest, because there is so little car to move. The handling has the pendulum character every rear-engined car of the era shares: grip, then a warning, then rotation, and the fix is rally technique, committed and on the throttle rather than off it. Later cars with the double-wishbone rear are noticeably more forgiving than the swing-axle originals. It is loud, hot in summer and tiring on a motorway, and none of that matters, because on the right road the berlinette delivers more sensation per kilometre than almost anything of its size and era.

Design

The shape began as Giovanni Michelotti's berlinette body for the A108 and became the A110 when the tail was reworked around the larger Renault 8 engine, wider, more muscular, and cut off flat behind the wheels. What survived the surgery is one of the great silhouettes: a nose low enough to hide behind a guardrail, a roofline that barely clears the driver's head, headlamps faired under glass, and twin Cibié driving lamps added in 1966, the same year the Renault diamond first appeared on the nose. The body is fiberglass bonded over the backbone chassis rather than bolted to it, so panel lines are more suggestion than seam and the whole car reads as a single moulded gesture. Detail changes track the years: chromed vents below the headlights from late 1965, flush push-button door handles from October 1973, and A310 four-stud alloys on late 1600s. Then there is the colour. Alpine blue is as inseparable from this car as red is from Ferrari, and the fact that the 2017 revival launched in the same hue, with the same faired lamps and the same haunches, tells you how little anyone wanted the design improved.

Motorsport pedigree

The record book opens with the 1971 Monte Carlo Rally, which Ove Andersson won before Alpine team-mates filled the podium behind him; Andersson went on to take Sanremo, the Austrian Alpenfahrt and the Acropolis that season, sealing the International Championship for Manufacturers. When that series became the World Rally Championship for 1973, Alpine-Renault won the inaugural title outright: six victories from thirteen rounds, another Monte Carlo podium sweep with Jean-Claude Andruet and 'Biche' leading it home, and a final score of 147 points, 63 clear of Fiat, with Lancia, Porsche and Ford further back. The driver roster reads like a French rally hall of fame: Thérier, Darniche, Nicolas, Andruet. There is a technical first in the story too. A turbocharged A110 won the 1972 Critérium des Cévennes, often cited as the first international rally win for forced induction, eight years before Audi made turbochargers orthodoxy. The end came quickly: the purpose-built Lancia Stratos arrived in 1974 and made every converted road car obsolete, the A110 included. The berlinette retired to the historic scene, where it remains a fixture of the Rallye Monte-Carlo Historique.

In culture

In France the berlinette occupies the cultural slot the Mustang holds in America: not just an admired car but a shared national memory. It was the car on the newsstand covers when French rallying ruled the world, the shape a generation of schoolboys drew in the margins of their exercise books, and the reason Alpine blue reads as a patriotic colour. The Gendarmerie ran berlinettes in period for fast-pursuit work, and the association stuck well enough that when the modern A110 arrived, the force ordered a fleet of those too. The revival itself is the strongest testament. Renault marked the car's fiftieth anniversary with the A110-50 concept in 2012, then relaunched the road car in 2017 as a faithful homage, same name, same proportions, same blue. The gamble worked and the brand grew around it, to the point that Renault's Formula 1 team now races under the Alpine name. Few cars have carried an entire marque back from the dead. For the original berlinette that is the deepest kind of fame: not a movie cameo, but a car so loved that a whole company was rebuilt in its image.

Rivals

Cars from other manufacturers that competed for the same buyers when new.

Owning One

Why collectors want it

If France has a national sports car, it is this one. The berlinette is the founding champion of the World Rally Championship, the car French schoolboys of the seventies grew up wanting, and with 7,176 built at Dieppe there are never enough honest ones to go around. The hierarchy inside the market is clear. Genuine works and Group 4 competition cars sit at the top and trade almost entirely on provenance. The 1600S is the road-going grail, the closest showroom specification to the rally winners, and it carries a firm premium over everything else. The 1300S and 1300G offer most of the same experience with a lighter tail and lower cost, and a vocal minority insists they are the better drive. The four-speed V85 and the license-built Dinalpin and FASA cars are the approachable entry, sometimes at a real discount. What lifted the whole pyramid is the revival: when Renault returned the A110 name to production in 2017, it reintroduced the original to buyers far beyond France, and the best cars have been setting records since, including a $241,250 sale in early 2026.

Which one to look for

Rank them by engine, then by honesty of the paperwork. The 1600S is the road-car grail: the aluminium Renault 16 TS engine on twin Weber 45s, 125 horsepower DIN pushing roughly 700 kilograms, and a car that would run 210 km/h in 1969. From May 1973 it took the A310's 1,605cc engine, and from that October the swing-axle rear gave way to double wishbones, a change worth seeking out; the injected 1600SI is the family's rarity. Below it, the 1300S with the tuned 1,296cc Gordini unit is the connoisseur's pick, arguably the best balanced of all, with the milder 1300G a softer twin. The V85, with the Renault 12's 1,289cc engine and four speeds, was the volume car and is the honest way in. The last SX cars carry a single-carb 1,647cc engine and suit touring more than sprinting. Above everything sit the Group 4 cars, 172 horsepower 1600s and later 185 horsepower 1800s, which are competition machinery with competition money attached. License-built Dinalpins from Mexico and FASA cars from Spain widen the net at friendlier prices.

1100 · 1963–1969

Renault 8 Major and twin-carb Gordini 1,108cc engines in single and high-output states. The car that made the berlinette a serious rally tool in the mid sixties.

1300G · 1967–1971

The gentler 1300, with the stock 1,255cc Gordini engine. Same body and chassis, softer state of tune.

1300S · 1966–1971

Tuned 1,296cc Gordini unit rated up to 120hp SAE, nearly always five-speed. Many regard the 1300S as the best-balanced road berlinette of all.

1600 · 1968–1970

Stock Renault 16 TS 1,565cc engine in mild tune. A short-lived stepping stone to the S.

1600S · 1969–1975

The grail. Tuned 1,565cc Cléon-Alu on twin Weber 45s, 125hp DIN and 210 km/h; from May 1973 the A310's 1,605cc engine (carburetted SC, injected SI), and from October 1973 a double-wishbone rear in place of swing axles.

1600SX · 1975–1977

The final French A110: single-carb 1,647cc R16 TX engine, softer character, chrome trim deleted. The last berlinette left Dieppe in July 1977.

956 · 1963–1965

The launch car: 956cc Renault 8-derived four, a four-speed gearbox and disc brakes all round. Modest pace, purest early body, and the start of the whole story.

Group 4 (1600S / 1800)

The competition berlinettes: high-compression 172hp Group 4 1600S from October 1970, replaced from October 1973 by the 1,798cc 185hp 1800. The specification that swept Monte Carlo and won the 1973 championship; genuine cars trade on provenance.

V85 / 1300 · 1970–1976

The volume car: Renault 12-based 1,289cc engine and a four-speed gearbox. Renamed 1300 from late 1973. The honest entry point to Dieppe-built ownership.

What owning one is like

Owning a berlinette is mostly a story about heat, noise and vigilance, and owners will tell you all three are part of the charm. The engine sits behind you in a snug bay and summer traffic warms the cabin; the sound insulation is a fiberglass shell's worth, which is to say nearly none, so long trips are loud. The structural worry is the one you cannot see: the steel backbone lives under bonded fiberglass, and moisture trapped where glass meets metal corrodes the chassis quietly for years. A car that has lived dry, with recent photographic evidence of its underside, is worth real money over one that has not. Gel-coat crazing and small stress cracks are normal and honest on an old fiberglass body; fresh paint over a wavy panel deserves questions. Early swing-axle cars ask for respect in the wet until you learn their language. The electrics are simple, and the engines are tough Renault fours that ask for nothing exotic. Most of what fails is cheap. The one thing that is not cheap is neglect of the chassis, which is why the good cars stay good and the projects stay projects.

Upkeep & parts

The running gear is the easy half of ownership. Engines and gearboxes came from mainstream Renaults, the 8 Gordini, 12 and 16 among them, so service parts, rebuild expertise and tuning knowledge are plentiful and sensibly priced, especially in France, where a deep bench of Alpine specialists has kept these cars alive for fifty years. Carburettors, brakes and suspension hold no mysteries for any competent classic shop. The specialist half is the structure: fiberglass repair rewards an experienced hand, and anything involving the backbone chassis, from outrigger repair to full body-off restoration, belongs with a marque specialist and should be budgeted accordingly. Trim and glass are harder to source than mechanical parts, so a complete car is worth more than the sum of a project's boxes. The club scene is the great multiplier. Club Alpine Renault and the Renault Alpine Owners Club in the UK, the big French forums, and the long-running reference sites between them can decode a chassis number, find a panel and point you to the right specialist in an afternoon. Run one inside that network and the berlinette is a far easier car to keep than its looks suggest.