Colapinto under Briatore’s glare: blunt words, cautious belief at Alpine
Zandvoort to Monza told the same story inside Alpine: one side of the garage radiates calm with Pierre Gasly locked in long-term, the other is a little noisier as Franco Colapinto fights through his first proper run as a Formula 1 starter. Ten race weekends in, the Argentine’s learning curve has met the rock face of expectation—and Flavio Briatore is not one to sugarcoat it.
“Maybe he needs another year or two to be part of Formula 1,” Briatore said of Colapinto in a candid media turn. “It’s very difficult to cope with this car. Very heavy, very quick. He tries very hard…but it’s not what I expect.”
That’ll play loud on social, but it misses the nuance of the wider Alpine mood music. Colapinto’s path to the blue car was hardly textbook: a burst of buzz from a sharp cameo at Williams last year, a reserve role at Enstone, and then the seat—without the luxury of a pre-season—after Jack Doohan’s six-race stint in late 2024. Since then, he’s been learning on the fly in a car that hasn’t exactly made life easier for either driver.
There have been rookie bruises: a couple of costly errors, including a high-profile incident during a Pirelli test in Hungary. But there’s been a clear trend the other way too. In recent rounds Colapinto’s single-lap and race pace has edged closer to Gasly’s, and the tone in his voice has lifted as F1 returned to circuits he actually knows.
“I’m feeling better. I’m feeling more confident,” he said over the Italian Grand Prix weekend. “From Budapest we’ve made a step in the right direction. The car is still a bit unpredictable, but I think I’ll get that tenth I’m sometimes missing at the tracks I know.”
Briatore’s straight talk, then, sits alongside something else: patience. The Alpine executive, famous for wielding the axe when it suits him—ask Jarno Trulli circa 2004—hasn’t pulled it here. In fact, in Italy he also struck a different note: “For the moment, I believe Franco is doing a good job. He paid a bit for inexperience in the beginning, like a lot of young drivers.”
It’s a key distinction. This isn’t indulgence; it’s a live performance review with stakes. Alpine knows the field is compressed to the point where two-tenths can swing a driver from the fringes of Q3 to the depths of Q1. James Vowles, who ran Colapinto at Williams, even chimed in to underline that compression and offer public backing. When rivals go out of their way to stick up for a young driver, the hint is usually that there’s real ability worth the wait.
Inside Enstone, the calculation is simple enough. If Colapinto stays the course into 2026, he finally gets a clean runway: new technical regulations, a full winter, and a proper build-up with his crew. That’s when you stop judging survival instincts and start judging output. Briatore has talked up the need for stability, and keeping both drivers would give Alpine a consistent baseline for its next car. New managing director Steve Nielsen—no stranger to tough decisions—will share that instinct if the trend remains encouraging.
None of this is to pretend Alpine doesn’t have options. If the form stalls or the errors stack up, they could yet take a late-season look at another youngster, with Paul Aron often whispered as the next in line. But that’s a contingency, not the plan. The plan is to let Colapinto keep climbing.
It’s worth remembering how we got here. The Williams cameo set expectations on fire, not least because it came free of pressure. Colapinto arrived with low noise and left with big headlines and even bigger links—at one point Red Bull included. Hype can be a cruel mistress. Briatore himself admitted the team might’ve piled it on: “Maybe we put too much pressure on him… Sometimes we underestimate the human part of the driver.”
So, where are we? Somewhere between blunt realism and guarded belief. Colapinto isn’t delivering what Alpine ultimately expects from that seat—yet—but he’s shown enough growth to hold the room. If Briatore really wanted rid, history suggests he’d have done it already.
There’s a version of this story we’ve seen before: young driver takes the hits, finds a rhythm once the calendar loops, and uses a regulation reset to reset his own game. Alpine, a team desperate for clear direction, could do with that kind of arc. Gasly is the reference. Colapinto’s job is to make the gap boringly small, week after week.
He knows it. Briatore knows it. And for now, that’s enough to keep the door open to 2026.
