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”.
