Franco Colapinto, between Alpine errors and poor rhythm in Australia
The Argentine driver was far from the points zone in the first race of the Formula 1 season: he received a penalty and finished 14th.
Alpine took little reason to celebrate from the Australian GP that opened the 2026 Formula 1 season. The French team bet all its chips on the new regulations a year in advance, ruling out any attempt to achieve something moderately good in 2025. Scoring just one point in Melbourne, led by Pierre Gasly, is a meager harvest after having set the bar precisely this year, a phrase repeated in every dark weekend of the previous tournament. For Franco Colapinto, the entire Grand Prix at Albert Park was an ordeal, almost a continuation of what he experienced (and suffered) in his participation last year.
The Enstone team arrived in Australia with the goal of fighting for the top of the middle zone, however, all that was far away. Gasly was tenth, taking advantage of a very good start and the abandonments that occurred due to lack of reliability (Isack Hadjar and Nico Hülkenberg) or unusual accidents (Oscar Piastri, in the open pit laps before the grid). And the Argentine driver was 14th. In any case, one unit is not enough for the bar that Flavio Briatore himself had set: being in the fight for sixth or seventh place.
For Colapinto everything was uphill. Since Friday’s training, without that performance that the A526 had outlined in the preseason tests in Bahrain. In the classification, he advanced to Q2 through the window and in that instance he was last, destined to finish 16th (Gasly occupied 14th place).
The race was very long for the Buenos Aires driver. At the start he starred in one of the most spectacular maneuvers that the entire 2026 season will surely have by reflexively avoiding Liam Lawson’s Racing Bulls, stopped on the track. Although he did not manage to advance much in the fight, he was involved in the fight to try to advance. However, suddenly the blow fell that definitively jeopardized their chances: the FIA reported that car 43 was being investigated for violating the starting system. After ten laps the penalty arrived: ten seconds of stop and go, a very harsh penalty that is only surpassed by exclusion.
When the track engineer notified Colapinto of the sanction, the Argentine did not understand. There was no error on the part of the driver: a mechanic pushed the car back to accommodate it in the box when they were already within the closed time to be able to get closer, all the responsibility of the team. In fact, his engineer apologized for the situation. After serving his sentence, the man from Buenos Aires returned to the track in the background and to a world of rest. Everything was finished.
The team chose two different strategies for the start of its drivers: Gasly started with medium tires and Franco, with hard tires. With everything already lost after the penalty, the Argentine stayed on the track for 48 laps with the same set of tires. Of course, in the final part of the eternal stint the lap pace was very high, lapping two seconds behind the leading times. The final ten turns were on soft tires for Colapinto and, with the tank already completely unloaded, he achieved some very fast turns, but everything was already lost.
A team error and tires with many spins that left him without rhythm from the middle of the race onwards were the culmination of a very complicated weekend for Alpine and that left Colapinto in 14th place. His track engineer apologized again once the checkered flag was shown. The general progress of the team seemed to be a continuity of 2025, when the expectation at Enstone was much higher for this season. From the start, the French team clearly lost to Racing Bulls, Haas and Audi in that fight to lead the middle zone that, in the previous one, had them as candidates. In one week it will be held in China, the time to find important improvements is short, but mainly Colapinto’s team will have to work on achieving more performance in qualifying, the part of the Australian weekend that mortgaged everything. The year is long and with a completely new technical regulation, the development curve for all teams will be enormous. The problem is Alpine’s start, far from what was expected and, especially, from the giant bet that was made.
