Otro Capital Hires Bankers to Sell Its Alpine Stake

Otro Capital wants out of Alpine, and now it has a bank to help with that. According to Sportico, the American investment firm hired BDT & MSD Partners to find a buyer for its 24% stake in the team. Sportico heard it from four people close to the process, and it published the story on Wednesday, November 11. BDT and Otro both declined to comment.

A bank on board does not mean that a deal will happen. But the interest is there, and Otro already has several bids. Flavio Briatore, who is an adviser at Alpine, talked about it in September with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. “There are at least seven investors ready to buy it,” he said.

Until this fall Otro simply could not sell, or only to Renault. When the group came into the team in 2023, it agreed to a three-year lockup, and that period ran out in September. Renault still has the right of first offer, and reports say it also has a say on who the buyer is.

The deal from June 2023 was worth 200 million euros. Otro led the group, and RedBird Capital Partners and Maximum Effort Investments, the investment company of Ryan Reynolds, were in it too. Later some athletes joined as well, like Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce and Rory McIlroy. The actors Michael B. Jordan and Rob Mac also invested. At that time the whole team was valued at around 900 million dollars. Now Sportico puts Alpine at 3.28 billion dollars, which is 58% more than in its list from last year. For comparison, the last stake sale at Aston Martin valued that team at about 3.3 billion.

Renault is not happy with how the partnership went, and its CEO Francois Provost said it openly in July. “We manage the team,” he told the media. “Otro has no right, and no added value, to help us to operate.” He also said that “the partnership with Otro was not successful.” But he had nothing against the sale itself. “They want to sell, they will get the good benefits,” Provost said.

Mercedes talked with Otro earlier this year. But in late May they ended the talks, because the two sides could not agree on the price. Back then the reports said that Otro wanted around 720 million dollars for the stake. At this price the whole of Alpine would cost about 3 billion. Mercedes thought that the team is worth only 2.2 to 2.4 billion. After Mercedes left, Renault decided to stop the other talks too, at least for the moment. Christian Horner also wanted the stake, together with a group of investors. He ran Red Bull for twenty years, until 2025. Today Otro reportedly asks for 750 million dollars. In 2023 it paid 200 million euros, so now it wants more than three times as much.

In April Renault changed one of its people on the team board. Guillaume Rosso, its global head of mergers and acquisitions, took the seat of chief financial officer Duncan Minto. For PlanetF1, this was a sign that the sale is getting closer.

Briatore himself is calm about who the new owner will be. “Not really my problem, this is more the issue of Renault,” he said in the summer. “Renault is negotiating. We have Otro, now tomorrow we have somebody else.” He also joked about how much F1 teams cost now: “If the team was mine, I’d have sold already!”

Otro is not an old company. Four people who used to work at RedBird founded it in 2023. One of them is Alec Scheiner, and after the Alpine deal he joined the board of the team. In February Otro closed its first fund with 1.2 billion dollars. The plan was to get 500 million, so they got more than double. Otro has money not only in Alpine, but also in Two Circles, FlexWork Sports and On Deck Sports.

On the track, Alpine is sixth in the constructors’ standings, with Pierre Gasly and Franco Colapinto as drivers. The season has three more races, in Las Vegas, Qatar and Abu Dhabi. Fifth place is still possible, but Racing Bulls want it too. Renault will keep its 76%, and the company says that it does not want to sell Alpine. So only the 24% of Otro is on the market, and from now on a bank takes care of it.