Alpine just built a one-off version of its hottest electric hatchback, dressed it in the exact shade of red that lives on a tennis shirt collar, and is sending it to a black-tie lawn party in France instead of a racetrack. That’s not an oversight. It’s the entire strategy.
The car in question carries the almost absurdly specific name “Beware of the Crocodile – Alpine Lacoste A290 Rallye,” a joint project between Alpine and French sportswear house Lacoste built on the bones of the A290 Rallye, already Alpine’s most extreme, track-focused take on its electric hot hatch. It goes public on September 13 at the Chantilly Arts & Elegance Richard Mille, a concours d’elegance staged on the grounds outside Paris, where it will sit on Alpine’s stand and then roll across the show lawn during the judged parade alongside a lineup of heritage Alpines spanning more than 70 years, plus a handful of customer and club cars.
That venue choice tells you more than the spec sheet does. A concours d’elegance isn’t judged on lap times or quarter-mile numbers; it’s judged on design, craftsmanship, and presentation, which is exactly why a luxury watchmaker sponsors this particular event and why brands increasingly treat these lawns the same way they’d treat a fashion week runway. Backfire covered a similar dynamic at Monterey Car Week, where the real story wasn’t the cars crossing auction blocks but the culture built around them. Sending a one-off to Chantilly instead of a rallycross stage runs on the same instinct: this car is built to be looked at first, driven second.
The design work leans hard into that idea. The red theme is pulled directly from the crocodile’s tongue in Lacoste’s logo, carried across the exterior and into a cabin trimmed in the brand’s “petit piqué” fabric, the waffle-textured cotton weave that’s made Lacoste polo shirts recognizable by touch alone for decades. It’s a bold material choice for a car interior, since piqué cotton wasn’t engineered for the UV exposure, abrasion, and years of friction a seat bolster deals with, which is a reasonable bet to make on a one-off that will never see a daily commute. Alpine also worked 290 separate crocodile references into the design, a wink at the car’s own name that nobody clocks unless they’re told to look for it.
Where this collaboration separates itself from the usual fashion-branded special edition is under the skin. Alpine didn’t just re-trim a stock A290 Rallye; the car gets widened tracks, a reinforced braking system, and retuned electric powertrain management for sharper response. Those aren’t cosmetic changes. EVs carry hundreds of pounds of battery weight that a combustion hot hatch never had to answer for, so a wider track buys back cornering stability and stronger brakes buy back stopping distance that extra mass eats into. It’s the same logic Bugatti applied with its one-off Destrier built from a Bolide: even when a car exists purely as a showpiece, the engineering underneath still has to justify calling it a performance model.
Zoom out and this fits a pattern that’s become common across the industry: automakers pairing with fashion and lifestyle brands to build one-off vehicles that generate headlines and cultural relevance without touching a production line. Backfire has tracked that same instinct on the celebrity side, including the one-off Lincoln Navigator built around a client’s personal history rather than a spec sheet. For Alpine specifically, the timing matters. The brand relaunched its “Dream Garage” as an all-electric lineup, starting with the A290 hot hatch in 2024 and the A390 fastback in 2025, and it still races in Formula 1, a program Backfire has followed closely through Alpine’s recent driver contract moves, which means the brand needs cultural cachet that goes beyond spec sheets and lap times while its electric lineup is still building an identity.
For anyone hoping to actually buy this thing: you can’t, and you likely couldn’t get close to it even if you tried. It’s a one-off built for display, not sale, and Alpine still doesn’t sell cars in the United States, so this is strictly a look-but-don’t-touch situation for American enthusiasts. The closest real-world equivalent is the standard A290 Rallye itself, sold in Europe, which delivers the widened track and the sharpened brakes without the crocodile embroidery or the six-figure fashion-house halo.
Whether or not Lacoste’s involvement moves a single A290 off a European lot, the car does its actual job the moment it rolls across Chantilly’s lawn on September 13. It just won’t be doing that job anywhere near an apex.
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