LONDON, June 22 — As the rejuvenated sportscar company gets ready to launch its first new model in 21 years, Alpine will be using this year's Goodwood Festival of Speed (FoS) to remind the car-loving public of its impressive motorsports heritage and to get them excited about the cars about to come.

In all, the company, now part of Renault, is bringing 11 different Alpines to this year's FoS including the A460, the racer fresh from wining the LM P2 category at the 2016 Le Mans 24 hours earlier in June.

To show how much times have changed, it will be performing on the Hillclimb circuit alongside the A442 B, the Renault Alpine car that won Le Mans outright in 1978 and gave the company the proof it needed that it could compete in Formula 1.

However, the Alpine most likely to cause excitement is the Vision concept. First unveiled in February as a definitive clue to what the company's first production road car in over two decades will look like, it takes the classic lines of the Alpine A110 and reinterprets them for the 21st century.

The car has a low centre of gravity, a mid-mounted engine and rear-wheel drive. The company hasn't confirmed exactly what that engine is but has claimed that thanks to the car's low stance and use of weight-saving materials, it's enough to deliver a 0-100km/h time of 4.5 seconds. And that figure is important as Alpine promises the same stat for the production version due very soon.

To make sure that visitors can see the family resemblance, several examples of the iconic Alpine A110 will also be on show in hardtop and in ultra-rare convertible form. And last but not least there will be an appearance from the car that started everything -- Le Marquis.

Alpine founder Jean Rédélé was a talented mechanic and one that liked his Renault 4CV, but he was convinced he'd love it if he could make faster. He modified the engine and then started looking to aluminum and fiber glass as a means of making the body lighter. The Le Marquis was built in 1954 with an aluminum body designed by Giovanni Michelotti. It was shipped to the US where it was going to be reproduced with a fiberglass shell and sold in large numbers to challenge the popularity of British sportscars in the country.

However, while nothing came of the deal, the car, which in Alpine's words is ‘the flame' that lit the Alpine fire, had been stranded in the US until now. Rédélé's son Jean-Charles recently oversaw its return to France and now it will be greeting the Goodwood crowds.

This year's Goodwood Festival of Speed runs June 23-26 in England. — AFP-Relaxnews