Franco Colapinto’s Friday in Melbourne has already acquired an unwanted footnote, with Alpine’s Argentine rookie called to the stewards after a heart-in-mouth moment involving Lewis Hamilton in second practice for the 2026 Australian Grand Prix.
The incident came early in the afternoon session at Albert Park. Colapinto was negotiating the final corner when the A526 appeared to suffer a sudden loss of drive — the car looking, for a moment, like it had dropped into neutral. Whatever the root cause, the effect was immediate: Colapinto crawled onto the main straight with drastically reduced momentum.
That in itself isn’t unusual in modern F1 practice — cars glitch, systems trip, drivers nurse them back — but the detail that’s landed Alpine in the stewards’ office is where Colapinto put the car next. Rather than peeling decisively away from the racing line, the Alpine remained on the line down the straight while effectively rolling.
Hamilton arrived at speed in the Ferrari with little time to process what he was seeing: a near-stationary car where he expected clean tarmac and a normal closing rate. He avoided contact, but only just, and immediately flagged it on the radio, describing the Alpine as “crazy slow”.
The FIA has summoned Colapinto for an alleged breach of FIA F1 Regulations Section B, Article B1.8.5 — “driving unnecessarily slowly, erratically, or in a manner which could be deemed potentially dangerous to other drivers”. That regulation is typically applied when a driver’s behaviour creates a hazard, even if the original trigger was mechanical.
What the stewards will need to untangle is the nuance: if Colapinto genuinely had no propulsion and limited options, to what extent could he reasonably be expected to get off line and out of harm’s way? Drivers are drilled to clear the racing line at the first safe opportunity, but there’s a fine line between “should have moved” and “couldn’t move” when a car won’t drive properly and you’re trying not to make the situation worse — or strand it in an even more dangerous place.
From Alpine’s perspective, it’s the sort of awkward, slightly messy episode that can happen when you’re fighting the car and the systems rather than the lap time. From the stewards’ perspective, though, the outcome is what matters: a high-speed closing scenario on a straight in broad daylight, with a driver forced into late avoidance in a session where everyone is running programmes and not expecting obstacles on the racing line.
If the FIA concludes Colapinto had sufficient control to place the car somewhere safer — even at low speed — then the discussion shifts from “unfortunate” to “avoidable”. And in that case, penalties in practice are uncommon but not unheard of, particularly if the stewards feel a precedent needs to be reinforced early in a season.
Either way, the incident has put the spotlight on a basic but non-negotiable part of modern F1 etiquette: when something goes wrong, your first job is to stop being a moving target. In Melbourne, Colapinto became one — and Hamilton was the one who nearly collected it.
