Krief: The engineering guru who swapped Ferrari for Renault

A successful one, admittedly – young Krief was rolling around in the back of DS Citroëns and had a soft spot for his father’s Peugeot 504 coupé (the Pininfarina one, he reminds me), so delectable metal was on the scene. But it wasn’t the impetus. 

Engineering was the job he always wanted to do, “so I combined cars with my passion”, he says. Engineering was the desire, cars the vessel. The balance has since shifted, and Krief today can’t imagine engineering anything else.

He says: “The thing I learned, and that I now know would be difficult not to have, is the soul you give to a car,” he says. “You can feel it when you test drive it.” I guess you can’t get quite the same kick from designing an MRI machine, or even an unmanned rocket.

That soundbite is typical Krief talk. He speaks softly, authoritatively, in accented English, enunciating precisely as he describes engineering concepts and management structures, but then often expressing a sentiment that would sound twee coming from anyone else.

It helps that ‘soul’ is very much his oeuvre, as anyone who has tried his back catalogue knows. You get the sense Krief is a unique proposition.

On one hand the man is obsessed with quantitative approaches – “at the end of the day, what makes the car feel [special], even if it looks subjective, can be measured” – and he champions simulators, with their potential to do all the dogsbody bits of chassis development, driving down costs and freeing up talent.

But he also firmly believes the human touch is non-negotiable if you’re going to create a sports car that is “completely harmonious in everything”. 

In many ways he is perfectly suited to taking a romantic brand like Alpine forward into what is, technologically, still rather an unknown space. The extent of Krief’s uniqueness as a world-class chassis developer surely stems from his geographically varied and demanding career path.

Part of the final year of an engineering degree was spent at Renault, developing early suspension simulation models. It was pioneering stuff in the ’80s – and perhaps useful preparation for today’s uncertain world. Next was Michelin, when tyre development was still a “trial and error process”.

He talks fondly of his then-boss, who inspired him by “pushing some concepts that, in the company, he alone believed in”, but he had the data and the will to prove it to the doubters further up the corporate food chain. Then came a move to Japan, to help the French tyre maker win lucrative OEM contracts.

There, Krief’s own delight in detail and fact was “enhanced by a factor of 1000” by the Japanese engineers. “They were so precise,” he says, “so willing to understand, so deep in the analysis.”

One imagines the subsequent move to Italy, to head up chassis development for transverse Fiat platforms – everything from 147 GTA to Ducato – was something of a culture shock, although it undeniably gave Krief huge engineering breadth.

Then Maranello. The low-speed back-axle jounce resistance of Fiat Doblos was swapped for the limit-handling characteristics of mid-engined supercars. Even today, Krief is best known for stitching together the dynamic canvas on which the 458 Speciale – one of the all-time great, exploitable supercars – imparts total joy on the driver.

And yet perhaps his real magnum opus was what came next: Alfa Romeo’s Giorgio platform was a storied project completed largely in secret, and the resulting Giulia was an anti-BMW 3 Series, as the Alpine A110 is an anti-Porsche Cayman. Same mechanical brief but with a wonderfully fresh, lively approach.

“We were asked to do the platform and first car in less than three years,” says Krief, “without any components from the Fiat world, and without any engineering [input] coming from Fiat, so we had to create a small team.”

The beauty of the small team, as Krief puts it, is that no single person designs just the suspension bushes or the drop links and so on. “There are guys who think about the [entire] system,” he says.

It’s an important way of working for Krief; it’s quite similar to the British school, and it’s something he not only sees and encourages in Alpine but which he is now inculcating on a deeper level across the entire Renault Group portfolio.