BWT Alpine Formula One Team names Apex Ultra its official AI for Engineering Partner.
A multi-year partnership brings Engineering Superintelligence to the design, simulation, and development of Alpine's Formula 1 cars — the first time a Formula 1 team has embedded a frontier AI lab's engineering intelligence across its technical operation, and the first public deployment of ESI.
ENSTONE, England, and MENLO PARK, Calif. — October 1, 2026 — BWT Alpine Formula One Team and Apex Ultra today announced a multi-year partnership that makes Apex Ultra the team's official AI for Engineering Partner. Under the agreement, Alpine's engineers will leverage Apex Ultra's Engineering Superintelligence (ESI) — artificial intelligence being trained to design, simulate, test, and build physical systems — to significantly increase the rate of car performance development.
At a glance
- Partnership. Apex Ultra becomes BWT Alpine Formula One Team's official AI for Engineering Partner under a multi-year agreement.
- Scope. Design, simulation, and development of Alpine's Formula 1 cars, from concept and aerodynamics through design, structures, systems, and manufacturing.
- Start. Immediately, developing the foundations for continuous learning and improvements across the engineering lifecycle.
- Where. Alpine's technical center in Enstone, United Kingdom, and Apex Ultra's headquarters in Menlo Park, California.
- Terms. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Why Formula 1
Formula 1 is the world's most challenging engineering competition, run at a development pace no other industry matches. Each season, top engineering teams simulate, evaluate, design, manufacture, and validate thousands of components, deliver upgrades every few weeks, and measure every decision against the stopwatch in front of hundreds of millions of fans. In this environment, competitive advantage no longer comes from spending or testing the most. It comes from learning and adapting the most from every test, every simulation, and every lap.
That is the problem Engineering Superintelligence is being built to solve. ESI is being built to reason across the multi-physics disciplines a Formula 1 car demands at once — aerodynamics, structures, thermodynamics, materials, and manufacturing — within the constraints the regulations impose, and it learns from what the track says next. Every race weekend becomes ground truth. In early case studies, ESI compressed highly complex engineering workflows from more than two weeks of expert work to just two days.
The next decade
For most of the modern era, aerodynamics has decided championships: the teams that understood airflow best, and turned that understanding into parts fastest, won. That will remain true. But the decisive variable is shifting from what a team knows to how quickly it can learn and adapt.
As aerodynamics defined the championship-winning teams of the last decade, the ability to learn and rapidly adapt with AI will define the championship-winning teams of the next, and beyond. Alpine and Apex Ultra are building for that decade now.
What ESI will do at Enstone
Inside the partnership, ESI will be trained and evaluated on Alpine's own engineering reality: design histories, CFD and structural analyses, wind-tunnel and rig results, and track data, working within the team's existing design, simulation, and engineering lifecycle tools. Alpine's engineers remain the authority on what goes on the car. ESI's job is to widen what they can consider and shorten the time it takes to know whether an idea is right.
- Exploring the opportunity space. Generating and evaluating far more design candidates than a team can hand-model under the regulations, with the trade-offs made explicit.
- Closing the loop with the track. Reconciling simulation with what the car actually does — the correlation problem every team lives with — and carrying what is learned into the next design decision.
- Designing for the factory. Weighing manufacturability, cost, lead time, and component life alongside performance, so that what is fast is also buildable in time for the next race.
- Remembering everything. Holding the full lineage of the car's development — why each decision was made and what happened — so the team's knowledge compounds rather than resets.
Why each other
Alpine chose a partner whose people have done this work at the highest level. Apex Ultra's engineers and researchers have come from the Mercedes-AMG and McLaren Formula 1 teams as well as NASA, SpaceX, the U.S. Space Force, and the Stanford AI Lab and Aerospace departments — people who understand both what learning systems can do and what a Friday practice session does to a development plan.
Apex Ultra chose Formula One because it is the most instrumented physical laboratory on Earth — twenty-four public experiments a year, each with a definitive result — and chose Alpine because the team has decided to learn and adapt faster than everyone else. Until now, Apex Ultra has been developing ESI largely outside the public eye. Formula One marks its first public deployment on a global stage.
"Formula One is the AlphaGo arena for engineering: the best engineers on the planet, competing in public, with a feedback loop measured in weeks rather than years. There is no better place to learn what it means for an intelligence to engineer, and no better partner than a team that has chosen to learn faster than everyone else. This is the first time our work towards ESI leaves our lab. We wanted the first place it went to be the hardest."
Denis Mars, Co-founder, Apex Ultra
"Formula One has always been won by the teams that saw the next decisive technology coming, committed to it early, and learned to put it to work best. Aerodynamics drove competitive advantage in the last three decades. The next will be defined by intelligence, by how fast a team can turn everything it learns into a faster car. Bringing Apex Ultra into Enstone is that commitment. We are not adding a tool to the factory. We are changing how the team learns and adapts."
Steve Nielsen, Managing Director, BWT Alpine Formula One Team
What fans will see
For fans, the impact of Apex Ultra's ESI technology will build on track over time. Closing the gap to the front of the grid will not be easy, but the faster learning cycle is designed to accelerate upgrades, with every race weekend's insights feeding directly into the next. Together, Alpine and Apex Ultra will redefine the limits of what is possible as we start fighting for podiums and beyond.
About Apex Ultra
Apex Ultra is a frontier AI lab building towards Engineering Superintelligence (ESI): AI that designs, simulates, tests, and builds complex machines and physical systems, trained and evaluated in the most demanding engineering environments in the world. Founded by two Stanford professors along with championship-winning Formula 1 engineers and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, and built by researchers and engineers from the world's leading AI labs, aerospace programs, and research departments, Apex Ultra is headquartered at SRI International in Menlo Park, California, with teams in San Francisco, Boston, London, Zurich, and Paris.
Visit: apexultra.com · Follow: @apex_ultra_ai
About BWT Alpine Formula One Team
BWT Alpine Formula One Team competes in the FIA Formula One World Championship with Grand Prix winner Pierre Gasly and rising star Franco Colapinto. The two drivers, under the leadership of Executive Advisor Flavio Briatore and Managing Director Steve Nielsen and piloting the revolutionary Alpine A526, are driving forward the team's charge during a highly competitive Formula One season. The team operates out of its Enstone factory in Oxfordshire, United Kingdom, where it has been based since 1992, in its previous guises as Benetton Formula, Renault F1 Team and Lotus F1 Team. Enstone has a winning legacy with seven Formula One World Championships including the Drivers' World Championship [1994, 1995, 2005 and 2006] with Michael Schumacher and Fernando Alonso, and the Constructors' World Championship [1995, 2005 and 2006]. The team's 2026 car, the A526, is designed and built on-site with the 1000-strong workforce working hard towards the new opportunities presented in the 24-race season.
For more information, please head to www.alpinef1.com
Media contacts
Apex Ultra
Apex Ultra Communications
press@apexultra.com
Press assets, including the Apex mark and share images, are available on request.
BWT Alpine Formula One Team
media@alpinef1.com
Note to editors
The company name is written "Apex Ultra" — two words, capital A, capital U. Engineering Superintelligence is abbreviated ESI. "AI for Engineering Partner" is the partnership category as agreed by both parties. Apex Ultra's mission, team, and approach are described at apexultra.com. This press release was prepared using generative AI alongside human contributors, and both companies reviewed and approved the final copy.