The actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, flush with the success they have brought to Wrexham football club, are expanding their sporting portfolio with an investment in the Alpine Formula One team.
Having been central to the most unlikely rags-to-riches story documented in the enormously popular TV show Welcome To Wrexham, their part in a £157m stake in Alpine is hoped to reap a similar reward in F1 which is enjoying a resurgence in global popularity.
On Monday Alpine, based in the UK at Enstone in Oxfordshire, owned by the car manufacturer Renault and branded after its sportscar range, announced they had sold a 24% stake in the team to a consortium of investors. They include Reynolds, the actor best known for his role in the Deadpool films, and McElhenney one of the lead actors in long-running sitcom It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia. The pair have also been joined by co-investor Michael B Jordan the lead in the Rocky spin-off, Creed films.
Reynolds and McElhenney had already enjoyed a remarkable success story with their investment in Wrexham. In 2021 the pair purchased the struggling north Wales club then competing in the National League, the fifth tier of English football. The pair wanted to set about transforming the club’s fortunes and filmed their efforts to do so for a documentary series. In April this year Wrexham secured promotion to League Two, after a 15-year absence and Disney announced they were to release a second season of the series.
Neither actor had any experience in running a football club but emboldened by their success have chosen to expand into F1 with Alpine, a team with ambitions to make its own step up into the top levels of the sport. There are no plans yet announced of a series to document their efforts but F1 already enjoys its own season-long soap opera in the form of the Drive to Survive Netflix show.
Drive to Survive was first shown in 2019 covering the 2018 season and with a focus on editing the stories to give a dramatic emphasis, proved enormously popular. It was renewed last year for its fifth and sixth seasons and has played a key role in the sport’s expansion in the US where it is enjoying a popularity not seen for decades. This year F1 will host three races there, in Miami, Austin and Las Vegas, with the latter promoted by F1’s owner Liberty Media.
The investment in Alpine by Reynolds, McElhenney and Jordan and their involvement in attempting to turn around Alpine’s fortunes is a storyline ready made for dramatisation and one which will doubtless appeal to the burgeoning US market.
Under the Renault brand the team enjoyed great success, winning two driver and constructors’ titles in 2005 and 2006 with Fernando Alonso but have struggled since to keep up with the three big teams in F1, Ferrari, Mercedes and Red Bull. They finished fourth in the constructors championship last season but require infrastructure investment to modernise and expand their facilities if they are to bridge the gap to the top.
Their driver Esteban Ocon is currently ninth in the drivers’ championship, with his teammate Pierre Gasly one place further back. Since the Renault team was rebranded as Alpine in 2021, they have managed one victory and three podium finishes.
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The new deal is expected to leverage the experience of the investors in sporting franchises. The US-based group includes the Maximum Effort Investments group of Reynolds, McElhenney and Jordan, Otro Capital and RedBird Capital Partners who own the third-largest stake in Fenway Sports Group, owner of Liverpool FC, the Boston Red Sox baseball team and has stakes in Milan and Toulouse.
That they feel confident of a return is a reflection of F1’s rude health. For years owning a team was a hugely expensive exercise, a money pit justified by major manufacturers for marketing. However under Liberty Media, the model has been transformed. They have increased the sport’s popularity and with the imposition of a budget cap brought about the initial moves to make competing financially sustainable and profitable. The value of teams is now on a sharp upward curve. As part of the sale of stock Alpine was valued at $900m and with the grid currently limited to 10 teams, these figures are only set to increase.
Alpine have stated their intent of moving to compete with the top three within four years and the CEO Laurent Rossi believed the investment was vital to do so. “This association is an important step to enhance our performance at all levels,” he said. “The incremental revenue generated will in turn be reinvested in the team, in order to further accelerate our Mountain Climber plan, aimed at catching up with top teams in terms of state-of-the-art facilities and equipment.”
