It appears we have our second in-season Formula 1 driver axing in 2025, with Alpine set to replace Jack Doohan with Franco Colapinto from the next race at Imola.
But has Alpine made the right decision? Our writers have their say.
Doohan wasn't really ever this Alpine's driver
Scott Mitchell-Malm
A driver change in season is always a sad development and very rarely anyone’s intention.
It reflects something not going as hoped or planned, and when it’s a new driver like Doohan, there is a particularly cruel aspect in that someone’s dream is over, and what they’ve worked incredibly hard to earn is taken away.
But ‘earn’ is an important word there. It’s not a protected, permanent status. What is earned must keep being earned and F1 drivers are subject to pretty excruciating, public performance reviews.
That’s true in the best of situations, let alone Doohan’s. He had an almost impossible job which, playing devil’s advocate, was a function of the team’s tendency for upheaval.
Doohan’s position in the junior programme, his previous reserve role, and his extensive testing programme were all put in place well before the current Alpine team leadership were around.
He isn’t ‘their’ driver. Never really was. And Oliver Oakes didn’t even join Alpine himself until the die was cast, as Alpine had missed out on Carlos Sainz - with Doohan left as the path of least resistance.
So, while Oakes was keen to back Doohan as much as possible, because that was in the team’s best interest, he and Briatore were inevitably going to want to make their own driver choices at some point.
Now that’s finally happening at Doohan’s expense, on a harsh timeline for any team except maybe Red Bull.
Doohan could have prevented this
Edd Straw
To select a driver and only run them for the first six events of a season (and one at the back end of the previous year) without being forced into the situation always reflects badly on a team's decision-making processes. But while Doohan deserves enormous sympathy for the sudden interruption, and likely end, of his F1 dream, it was in his hands to prevent it.
That's a harsh interpretation, perhaps, but at the top level you have to seize whatever opportunity you get with both hands and make the most of it. Doohan has failed to do that and make himself undroppable, which realistically was what he needed to do in the early races of 2025 to avoid this fate. You can argue that he was being set up to fail, but in F1 you are always vulnerable if you don't prove yourself to be a superstar driver and Doohan fell short of that.
However, it is a shame given he did show plenty of signs of good underlying speed, notably in outqualifying team-mate Pierre Gasly in main qualifying last weekend. There's no doubt he had the ability to become a regular points scorer, certainly at the tracks where the weaknesses of the Alpine package didn't make it impossible, and with more time there's no doubt he'd have had some strong weekends.
Elite sport can be cruel and Doohan has good reason to feel hard done by, but the reality is that he didn't do enough to stave off his fate. The team certainly didn't put him in a position to deliver his best and Doohan himself knew full well he was walking a tightrope, which won't have helped, but tough as it was, he could have done more even with this narrow window of opportunity.
We didn't see the best of Doohan this year. He will rue the fact that he only sporadically showed the very real pace that, in the longer term, would have allowed him to match, and at times beat, team-mate Gasly.
What did Alpine expect?
Glenn Freeman
Doohan hasn’t made a great fist of trying to seize his chance at the start of this year, but what did Alpine expect? The team undermined its rookie driver before the season had even started by dangling Colapinto over his head, and then, sure enough, it’ll be able to point to Doohan’s patchy handful of weekends as justification for the switch.
Will Alpine also accept that it didn’t give Doohan the best environment to get the job done due to the circumstances it created around him?
I’ve seen his struggles to look comfortable in F1 compared to the other rookies that have got off to good starts in 2025, but none of those came into this year fearing that after a handful of races they could be gone. So it’s not an entirely fair comparison.
The only surprise in this whole affair was the brief moment where it looked like the team had changed its mind and was going to give Doohan at least half a season. What happened with that?
With Alpine, it’s utterly plausible that someone changed their mind based on nothing of substance. Or perhaps it was a way to smoke out some more commercial support from South America, or speed up any incoming payments from existing arrangements…
None of the above is a reflection on Colapinto’s worthiness for an F1 seat. He should get off to a better start than Doohan did, and if he doesn’t, let’s hope he’s given more time to turn it around.
Let's never talk about driver-team loyalty
Val Khorounzhiy
Doohan definitely did not make an ironclad case that he was Alpine's best possible version for the long term, but there was also clearly no priority given to making this work. He was put in an unreasonable situation and couldn't beat the odds.
I'm not naive enough to pretend this is a novel way of going about business for F1. After all, it is probably no coincidence Alpine team boss Oakes has spent much of this year sounding like a punchier, jokier Christian Horner - and it's not like most F1 teams wouldn't discard both of their drivers in a heartbeat if they felt doing so could improve the team situation.
But it's just very, very funny when you remember the whole Oscar Piastri thing, all that hand-wringing about driver loyalty, all those quotes from then-Alpine chief Laurent Rossi about how now the Alpine Academy was suddenly maybe not worth it anymore because drivers and their management lacked integrity.
Different people are in charge now at Alpine, they certainly do not have to answer for Rossi's words, but it's a wider F1 thing anyway. It's a wider top-level motorsport thing anyway (yes, I'm thinking about the whole Alex Palou/McLaren saga).
No F1 driver should ever be faulted if they leave a team, even if everyone's saying they owe that team a lot. They can never-ever hesitate - because team bosses certainly will not.
You have to seize your chances in F1
Jon Noble
For all that Jack Doohan’s likely early exit from Alpine may seem unfair, considering some strong potential he has shown, we have to remember that Formula 1 is not a charity.
And one of the harsh realities about life as a F1 driver is that when opportunity comes knocking, you have to open the door and take it.
Just look at how Ollie Bearman’s destiny changed when he pulled off that sublime performance in Saudi Arabia last year, or even how Colapinto wasted no time in getting up to speed with Williams in Monza and Baku last year.
Doohan’s run of seven races offered plenty of opportunities for him to prove to his Alpine bosses that he was the right man to lead them on. After all, the biggest ace up his sleeve was incumbency.
But the results never came and, at the end of the day, teams do not keep drivers because of their potential tomorrow – they want to see what you deliver today.
Two lap one exits this year, a bunch of penalties and that Japanese GP crash (even though it emerged afterwards it was not 100% his fault he kept the DRS open) are the opposite of what Alpine needed, which was strong finishing positions and some points on the board.
There is no excuse that rookies need time to get up to speed now – just look at Isack Hadjar and how Kimi Antonelli put his Mercedes on pole position in the sprint race last weekend.
What Doohan had to do as a bare minimum, even with the competitive situation of Alpine not being brilliant, was make progress and ram home some finishes that showed he was moving onwards and upwards. That sadly did not happen.
Alpine has to share some of the blame
Gary Anderson
Some of these team principals need to take a good look at themselves and realise they are actually playing around with someone’s careers if not lives. They don’t seem to take any responsibility for these rash decisions.
Liam Lawson was a typical example at Red Bull, and now Doohan at Alpine - the management of both these teams made decisions to give these drivers a shot at the big time, so they should see that out and give them a fair crack of the whip.
How long do you give? Well, it’s a bit 'how long is a piece of string?'. In both these examples, the drivers have had the chop when at least, if not more than, 50% of the root cause of their failures were actually down to the teams.
I think they should stand by their commitments and give these guys a chance until they get a minimum of three clean race weekends and then make a judgment and not a spur-of-the-moment decision after a bad weekend.
As far as the Alpine decision is concerned, and its comments over the weekend it shows that Oliver Oakes, Alpine’s ‘team principal’ is simply a puppet, with Flavio Briatore pulling the strings behind the scenes.
OK, do I think Lawson or Doohan are or were going to be the next Max Verstappen? Probably not - but then is there another one on the horizon? Yes, probably Piastri is in line for that accolade, but is Colapinto a step forward from Doohan?
I think the jury is still out. If he can repeat his early performance when he replaced Logan Sargeant, then yes. But if he performs like he did at the end of his time in the Williams, then probably not.
This was inevitable
Charley Williams
Once again, another Formula 1 team has fallen victim to its own decisions.
The moment Alpine signed Colapinto as a reserve driver, it was always going to end this way.
I’m not naive, I know F1 is a brutal business - but before Doohan had even started the season, he was already under intense public pressure after the team he had been nothing but loyal to decided to put an alternative driver as a potential replacement in the shop window for everyone to see.
Has Doohan seized the opportunity given to him? No, but Alpine certainly haven’t provided him with the environment to thrive either.
However, this is the same team that let current championship leader Piastri slip through their fingers into the welcoming arms of McLaren - so should we really be that surprised?
