“Franco Colapinto will drive alongside Pierre Gasly for the next five races.”
That was the unusual proclamation in the headline of Alpine’s press release on 7 May announcing Australian rookie Jack Doohan had been dumped back to reserve status just six grands prix into the season.
Rumours of Colapinto’s imminent takeover had been circulating since late 2024. The news was unsurprising, even though there had been suggestions the Australian would be safe until the mid-season break shortly beforehand.
Fox Sports, available on Kayo Sports, is the only place to watch every practice, qualifying session and race in the 2025 FIA Formula One World Championship™ LIVE in 4K. New to Kayo? Get your first month for just $1. Limited time offer.
Explicitly giving the Argentine just five races in the seat, however, was a real surprise.
“As part of an ongoing assessment of its driver line-up, the team has made the decision to rotate one of its race seats for the next five rounds,” the press release said.
The team “therefore announces that Franco Colapinto will be paired with Pierre Gasly from the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix ahead of a new evaluation before the British Grand Prix in July.”
As if that wasn’t explicit enough, executive adviser Flavio Briatore — who by that time was also de facto team principal — emphasised that the change was an evaluation.
“Having reviewed the opening races of the season, we have come to the decision to put Franco in the car alongside Pierre for the next five races,” he was quoted as saying. “We are in a position where we see the need to rotate out line-up.
“The next five races will give us an opportunity to try something different, and after this time period we will assess our options.”
But as is the way with Alpine, Formula 1’s most chaotic team, that seemingly explicit position was watered down almost immediately.
“It’s not that a driver gets three or five races,” Briatore told Italy’s Sky Sport just days later. “I expected more from Jack Doohan. Maybe he needs a break.
“Franco will race as much as needed. I read somewhere that he’ll have five races, but no, there’s no set limit on his races.
“He needs to be fast, not crash, and score points. I’m only asking him these three things — not 10. If he does them well, he will drive forever.”
Briatore is believed to have been the driving force behind Colapinto’s inclusion in the team as Doohan’s replacement. The statement of almost unlimited faith was on brand.
But just two weeks, one big crash, two slow qualifying sessions and no points later, Briatore was markedly chillier on the Argentine’s prospects.
“I don’t know, honestly,” he said when asked how many races Colapinto would get. “If Colapinto is performing, he’s driving the car. If not, we’ll see.
“I don’t know at this moment if Franco will stay for the season or not, but let’s see. It depends on the performance. We’re only looking at the performance, nothing else.”
Colapinto’s original five-race deadline — or not — is coming up at this weekend’s Austrian Grand Prix.
It makes this week an important moment — or not — to assess how Alpine’s driver gamble is tracking.
PIT TALK PODCAST: Marc Marquez has planted his flag – literally and figuratively – on Francesco Bagnaia’s home turf to continue his championship domination. Is this the best he’s ever been? We ask TV world feed commentator Matt Birt for his view and for his take on the season to date. Plus: is Ferrari about to axe yet another team principal after its slow start to the season?
‘BE FAST, NOT CRASH, AND SCORE POINTS’
Briatore’s criteria were clear as Colapinto ascended to his full-time seat: be fast, don’t crash, score points.
It’s hard to justify a pass mark on any of those counts, having been comprehensively beaten by Gasly, having yet to score a point and having had a massive crash on his first weekend back.
But those criteria were a tough ask for a driver thrown into the car suddenly part of the way through the campaign.
Gasly is a seasoned operator who’s in his third season with the team. He knows Alpine inside out and understands the quirks of the car.
Colapinto, after joining from Williams during the off-season, didn’t even get pre-season testing. Expecting him to even get close to matching Gasly in five races was always optimistic.
Instead it would be better to compare him with Doohan. With a similar number of races under his belt and having been brought in supposedly as a points-ready performance upgrade, putting his stats alongside the Australian’s will help to reveal whether the driver switch has been a success.
At best the numbers suggest the move has been a sideways one for Alpine — or at least they did before the Canadian Grand Prix.
His qualifying crash in Imola seemed to dent his confidence, and he spent the following two races anchored to the back of the field. He qualified twice on the back row and was never higher than 17th in any non-race session.
In Canada, however, he qualified and finished ahead of Gasly, who started from pit lane after qualifying last thanks to a red flag in Q1 and then him failing to get his tyres up to temperature for his final all-or-nothing lap.
Given the small sample size, that one weekend skewed the Colapinto-Doohan comparison in the Argentine’s favour, especially in qualifying.
Qualifying differential
Doohan: 4.2 places behind (15.5 average)
Colapinto: 2.5 places behind (16.5 average) (before Canada: 6.0 places behind (18.0 average))
Gasly failing to set a representative lap in Canada also brought Colapinto’s average pace deficit down to being on par with Doohan, whereas beforehand he was considerably relatively slower.
Time differential*
Doohan: 0.236 seconds slower
Colapinto: 0.227 seconds slower (before Canada: 0.481 seconds slower)
*all laps normalised to 90 seconds to make different circuits comparable.
It’s harder to compare Doohan and Colapinto to Gasly when it comes to race finishes given both Alpine cars have been classified in only five of 10 grands prix — twice during Doohan’s tenure and three times with Colapinto in the team.
Colapinto finishing ahead of Gasly in Canada therefore boosted his average relative to his teammate, even if he’s been taking the chequered flag in pretty much the same position as Doohan had been.
Race differential
Doohan: 4.5 places behind (14.8 average)
Colapinto: 2.7 places behind (14.3 average) (before Canada: 5.0 places behind (14.7 average))
Assessing points scored also reveals little given neither Doohan nor Colapinto has finished a grand prix in the top 10.
Points scored
Doohan: 0-7 points (best finish: 13th)
Colapinto: 0-4 points (best finish: 13th)
Mark Marquez extends lead atop MotoGP | 01:01
DOOHAN DESERVED TIME, BUT SO DOES COLAPINTO
The summary of the above statistics is that Colapinto’s induction has brought no discernible bounce. While he demonstrated improved form in Canada, the comparison with his teammate there was coloured by Gasly’s own underperformance.
At best he’s been a match for Doohan.
That would be particularly frustrating for the Australian, who showed strong speed from the first race of the season and had overcome Gasly in qualifying for the first time at what turned out to be his final race.
And there’s every reason to think Doohan would have been continuing to improve. He was dropped before the opening triple-header of the season, which comprised circuits he knows well from his junior career and at which he’s had good form.
Considering Colapinto was ostensibly brought into the team to replicate his strong debut at Williams last year, scoring points just two rounds in, it’s hard to call this anything other than a failure.
And if Briatore “expected more” from Doohan, surely he thinks the same about Colapinto’s performances — sponsorship money aside.
That said, just as Doohan deserved more time to find consistency, Colapinto too deserves more than a handful of grands prix to prove he can lift his game now he’s the one behind the wheel.
The circumstances of his sudden promotion weren’t kind to him. Starting with a triple-header meant he had no time to digest lessons learnt each weekend, and having Monaco sandwiched in the middle — the most specific and confidence-sensitive circuit on the calendar — did him no favours.
“They [the first three rounds] were tough,” he said. “I was expecting to do a bit more progress after Imola, but it’s always tough to get back into F1 after six races of not being there.
“When you are not driving it’s really tricky.”
It’s perhaps not surprising that he had improved by Canada after getting a weekend off to process three rounds worth of insights into the Alpine car.
“I think it always helps to have a little bit of a break after a couple of races,” he said. “Getting into a triple-header is always difficult because you don’t have enough time to change things — to change enough things.
“I was used to something so different [at Williams], which didn’t give me enough time between races to reflect enough on it and learn and understand exactly what we need to do.
“We worked on many things. Just generally there are some things set-up-wise that have not been working for me. I felt very much almost out of phase with everything — with the tools in the car, with the set-up.
“One thing was fighting the other one. Once we understood that after the race in Barcelona, it made much more sense to me.”
Beating Gasly in qualifying was less important than his season-best 12th in Q2, which suggests genuine progress regardless of his teammate’s underperformance.
“It was not the result that we wanted from the weekend in Canada, but we made good progress session by session and showed we had potential in the car,” he said. “We just need to keep working hard and keep making steps in the right direction ahead of Austria this weekend.”
Feeney does top end hat-trick in Darwin | 02:02
ALPINE’S PROBLEMS ARE DEEPER THAN ITS DRIVERS
But it’s unclear how much time Colapinto will be given to make those steps given the lack of clarity of his five-race window.
In any case, dropping him after the Austrian Grand Prix this weekend, his fifth race, would make little sense given it’s back to back with the Great Britain. It would make more sense to pull the trigger in the break after Silverstone.
But while Alpine has made the identity of Gasly’s teammate a major story this season, really it has far bigger issues to deal with.
Despite some optimism early in the year — especially in Bahrain, where the team was dead last in 2024 but scored points this season — Alpine’s 2025 car is seriously troubled.
It’s the seventh-quickest team by one-lap pace this season, but its development trend is dire.
The development trend metric is measured by plotting a line of best fit between each team’s deficit to pole at every grand prix.
Because the season’s two biggest pole margins have been set at the previous two rounds, all but one team is calculated to be moving backwards from pole, but Alpine is doing so at an alarming rate of knots.
Development trend after 10 rounds
1. Aston Martin: improved by 0.393 seconds
2. Red Bull Racing: degraded by 0.126 seconds
3. Haas: degraded by 0.142 seconds
4. McLaren: degraded by 0.153 seconds
5. Sauber: degraded by 0.242 seconds
6. Mercedes: degraded by 0.329 seconds
7. Ferrari: degraded by 0.281 seconds
8. Williams: degraded by 0.535 seconds
9. Racing Bulls: degraded by 0.598 seconds
10. Alpine: degraded by 0.726 seconds
That declining form is evident in the team’s average gap to pole from the last five races.
Average gap to pole, rounds 6 to 10
1. McLaren: 0.057 seconds
2. Red Bull Racing: 0.242 seconds
3. Mercedes: 0.412 seconds
4. Ferrari: 0.544 seconds
5. Williams: 0.752 seconds
6. Racing Bulls: 0.853 seconds
7. Aston Martin: 0.911 seconds
8. Alpine: 1.151 seconds
9. Haas: 1.190 seconds
10. Sauber: 1.335 seconds
What would be most concerning is that Sauber has shown considerably improved performance since delivering a major upgrade package in Spain. Nico Hülkenberg has since scored points at two grands prix in a row, including a sensational fifth in Barcelona.
With Aston Martin also much improved in that time and with Haas a frequent but irregular scorer, Alpine has been dumped to last in the constructors championship with a little over half Sauber’s points, 11-20.
Who is driving the second car is almost irrelevant in this context. With Gasly having scored just twice all season, it’s clear Alpine’s bigger problem is its car — and that’s without mentioning the off-track turmoil of losing yet another team principal or the sudden resignation of Renault CEO Luca de Meo, plunging the team’s future into doubt.
But most drivers only ever get one shot at Formula 1. It’s up to Colapinto to make the most of his regardless of the circumstances.
And it remains to be seen whether Doohan will get the rest of his.