Franco Colapinto lived his worst day in Mexico with Alpine

The French team had no performance in its car at any time during the weekend and the Argentine finished last on the track, close to his teammate Pierre Gasly.

The pace achieved with the soft tires in the last handful of laps may become the only redeemable thing for Franco Colapinto during his time at the 2025 Mexico City GP, marked as the 20th round of the 76th F1 season.. The rest was almost an ordeal, but not only for the Argentine, also for his teammate Pierre Gasly and for the entire Alpine team.

In every World Cup presentation in the last year of the ground effect regulations, they talk about the same thing: Alpine has no performance. Is it surprising? No. It was explained a thousand times that Flavio Briatore decided to throw away 2025 to dedicate every second of effort to developing the car for the next tournament, which will arrive with new technical regulations. The Italian’s determination meant that no evolution came out of Enstone for the A525, which is nothing more than an A524 (the 2024 model) with another name. The big problem was that the base was also an uncompetitive car and that saved the year in the deluge of Brazil with an unthinkable 2-3.

Briatore, within his strategy, took for granted that the rest of the teams would follow the same path or, that, after a handful of races, they would close the 2025 program. And Flavio was wrong, an error that he acknowledged in the Netherlands. Thus, Alpine is far from the fight in all the races and the light with the rivals grows every weekend. In Hermanos Rodríguez it reached, for now, its maximum point. The Alpines were on another planet, they were cars almost from another category.

The race pace of the two A525s was very bad. The fact is that Gasly was 15th and Colapinto came 16th to close the classifier of the cars that finished the race (there were four abandonments). But the tremendous thing is that both were 37 seconds behind Lance Stroll in 14th place! Absolutely far from any chance of overcoming a rival.

The French opted for two different strategies, although with a stop for each driver. Colapinto started with hard ones and Gasly, with soft ones. The Frenchman stopped on lap 36 and completed 36 laps on soft tires. The Argentine stopped at 50 and closed the last 21 with the soft one. Result: they arrived close together, separated by 296 thousandths. There is no compound or race strategy that will work for Alpine this year.

As for Colapinto’s race, it was marked by a spin on the first lap, when he was squeezed by Lance Stroll in the second corner, he stepped on the grass and went away. The reality is that this did not modify any of the performance. In clean air, due to the ground lost by the spin, he turned faster than Gasly in the first laps. In the middle part of the Frenchman’s stint with yellow tires he was faster than the Argentine. Until Pierre’s means gave no more and Franco got in line. There they asked the Buenos Aires native for patience so as not to pass the Frenchman, who stopped in the pits.

In the final part, Colapinto, with his fresher soft tires, turned faster than Gasly, but the virtual safety car that forced Carlos Sainz’s mistake on the penultimate lap quelled any attack attempt.. The best thing the two Alpine riders experienced was the checkered flag that ended the ordeal.

Only one thing remains for the Enstone-based team in 2025: to announce who will be Gasly’s teammate in 2026. The decision will come in November, as Alpine sources confirmed to AM850, and all roads lead to the Argentine’s continuity. Perhaps the officialization will come before the next San Pablo GP, where Colapinto will be practically local, in addition to Gabriel Bortoleto, clear. Sportingly, in the team offices they cannot wait for the current championship to end and move on to the 2026 program, with a new car and as Mercedes customers for the engines. In the four remaining races, barely a miracle, much bigger than that of Brazil 2024, can bring a smile to the French team.