When Franco Colapinto’s testing crash added a postscript to Alpine’s disappointing sign-off for Formula 1’s summer break, it brought an easily forgotten driver saga back into focus.
Colapinto’s Hungaroring crash this week sparked plenty of comments online about his grand prix weekend performances relative to predecessor Jack Doohan, who was dropped after six races of 2025 back in May.
At the time, that change was stated to be a temporary evaluation, something team boss Flavio Briatore quickly revised. It seems to have become anything but temporary despite Colapinto not being an improvement on Doohan.
That is significant because this whole saga kicked off supposedly because Briatore wanted to work out Alpine’s best driver line-up for 2026, when the team will switch to Mercedes engines and Briatore believes it will vault up the pecking order.
“If Colapinto is performing, he's driving the car,” said Briatore in June. “If he's not performing, we'll see.”
Right now, though, Alpine looks no closer to settling its driver future. Eight races on from its change, Colapinto trails Pierre Gasly 13-0 for points and hasn’t looked like changing that.
An expensive and disruptive crash in testing this week was a very unfortunate development for both driver and team - which is last in the championship and in desperate need of a boost.
Second-guessing Briatore would be a foolish thing to do. Whatever his intentions, this driver mess is ongoing. And it is in Alpine’s interest to find a more permanent solution as soon as possible - even if that means making another change.
This is not an advocacy for Colapinto to be dropped and Doohan reinstated. But if there is a time to do so, it would be now. The summer break allows for a reset and then proper preparation for whoever is in the seat for the remainder of 2025.
So what will happen?
The case for Colapinto
Colapinto has had a psychologically bruising Alpine stint at times, as well as a couple of accidents. Fortunately, he was OK after his most recent crash at the Hungaroring’s fast Turn 11 right-hander - where there are no small shunts.
Alpine hasn’t indicated that the crash was anything other than a result of driver error. If so it is symptomatic of the lack of confidence and feel that has stopped Colapinto making the same impression with his new team that he did when he stepped in so strongly for Williams in the middle of 2024 with no F1 experience.
He has never seemed comfortable in the car since he crashed in his very first Alpine qualifying session. Although like Doohan before him, he has been compromised by Alpine’s poor competitive situation and volatile leadership.
Colapinto was put under immediate pressure by team boss Briatore to be fast and score points in a car that can be quick but is difficult to drive and weak in races, especially on tracks where energy management comes into play. And while there has been some 2023 car testing since Colapinto joined Alpine in January, plus those nine race weekends at Williams last year, he didn’t have pre-season like everybody else.
So Colapinto has been adjusting to a car that is very different to the Williams, with a much stiffer platform, in the cut and thrust of grand prix weekends. He’s needed more time to adapt than he hoped.
It’s not an excuse, it’s just reality. Any judgement of him has to consider those factors, which simply cannot get the best out of any driver.
At the same time, he’s been qualifying too far back to replicate any of Gasly’s heroics, and has occasionally seriously tested Alpine’s patience. There were people in the team who were not convinced that replacing Doohan with Colapinto was the right move, especially after Colapinto had crashes in his short Williams stint last year and had weekends where he really struggled to match Alex Albon’s pace there.
Colapinto’s a good driver who is better than he’s looked at Alpine so far. There have been a few flashes as the weekends have passed. He outqualified and beat Gasly in Canada and the most recent race in Hungary, and looked like he might be quicker than Gasly in Britain too only to spin out of qualifying early in Q1.
And when he did look solid, in Hungary, that coincided with a miserably uncompetitive weekend for the team - which also had a wheelgun problem at both his pitstops, costing him 13 seconds or so of race time and making his result look a lot worse than it was.
Colapinto’s struggled more often than not and his results are not an improvement on Doohan’s. But his best chance of staying in the car, outside of any financial backing from Latin America, is that Alpine sees his pace in Hungary as the start of a much needed uptick.
The case for Doohan
As for Doohan, he never seemed to have Briatore’s faith, and had the odds stacked against him from the start, with Colapinto’s presence a very obvious threat.
So, his window of opportunity to get back in F1 may be as narrow as Briatore either believing he was wrong to change drivers to start with (unlikely) or deciding that the ‘evaluation’ is going on after all and Doohan should be back in the car.
It would be wrong to simply keep Colapinto in the car because it’s embarrassing to do a U-turn. But if there is a serious, strong competitive case for leaving the driver line-up alone for the rest of the year, that’s different - and if that is what Alpine believes then Briatore should say so, and explain why. Because Briatore teed up this rotation as a 2026 evaluation, even though he tried to immediately back out of it being that.
Colapinto has chipped away at his deficit to Gasly, and now had a couple of weekends where he’s had the edge when both drivers are struggling with the car. That’s encouraging. However, it remains the case that he seems to be at least slightly slower than Doohan was.
Across all qualifying segments, both cars participated in (including sprints), Doohan was 0.16s slower than Gasly. Colapinto is a tenth further away and while his average deficit would drop slightly if you discounted Silverstone Q1, which Colapinto didn’t finish, that was self-inflicted so it is relevant to include.
So, what to do? There’s a good case for just letting Colapinto get on with it, and see how he copes with what would surely be his last chance at securing an F1 seat long-term. If he gets ousted at Alpine, it is hard to see where and how he could return - unless the new-for-2026 Cadillac team wanted to take a punt on him.
But the same goes for Doohan. And one factor that might play in his favour internally at Alpine and maybe within Renault itself, is that he is ‘one of their own’ - a product of an academy that a lot of money has been spent on. Promoting Doohan was meant to be how Alpine moved on from its embarrassing fumbling of Oscar Piastri three years ago, as Doohan became the first product of the Alpine academy to race for its F1 team.
Briatore turned his back on that, so clearly it had no resonance with him. All that matters, according to Briatore, is performance. But in that case, if he really wants to make an informed call on 2026, he may need to take a second look at Doohan.
Alpine’s competitive position isn’t drastically different to the first quarter of the season but rivals have improved so it would be interesting to see how Doohan stacks up relative to Gasly again.
Plus, it would be a way to check his mentality and resilience in responding to being dropped and getting one last chance to perform.
What happens now?
The problem Alpine has in deciding what to do with Colapinto is that the most rational thing also applied to Doohan early in the season. Once picked, the driver should be given time to prove himself.
Dump Colapinto and that’s hardly any better than how Alpine treated Doohan in the first place. Keep Colapinto regardless of his results and dropping Doohan, wrecking his F1 career, will have been for nothing - and Doohan’s trust will have been subverted given he has been working on the basis that he would be back in the car.
Of course, there’s the possibility that Briatore goes in a completely different direction. Even if plugging in an experienced driver like Bottas is out of the question, as he seems to be prioritising securing a long-term Cadillac deal, promoting another reserve might not be.
Paul Aron’s been getting FP1 experience with Sauber and continued with his 2023 Alpine test programme ahead of three planned FP1 outings with Alpine in the second half of 2025, so could be an interesting experiment.
One question is how much of a problem that would cause. When Alpine ‘rotated’ Doohan out for Colapinto in the first place, it is understood to have been agreed that if another change was made, it would be Doohan getting back in.
It’s a complicated and messy situation with no obvious ‘right’ answer. The sad thing is that whatever the outcome, it will come at the cost of a good young driver who deserves better.
