Franco Colapinto: mistake, breakage and early end of the second round in Abu Dhabi

The Argentine went off the track in the ninth turn, hit the floor of his Williams hard and was unable to continue with the training.

Franco Colapinto’s Friday at the Abu Dhabi GP, the last date of Formula 1 2024, was an up and down. After achieving his best result in a free practice by finishing seventh in the first round, in the second everything got complicated. He suffered a mistake, hit the floor of his Williams very hard and had to be kept in the pits for the rest of the training session due to the breaks generated.

The mistake occurred in the ninth corner, while he was traveling on his first lap with soft tires.. The Argentine had closed two excellent sectors and was traveling directly to take first place, but he had to abort the turn by exiting the track. The slopes of Abu Dhabi are an ordeal due to their height and, when a driver exceeds them, the blow in the lower area is hard.

Barely 22 minutes into the 60 minutes of practice had passed, when Franco broke the floor of his FW46. The mechanics began working on the repair and quickly realized that there was no chance of repairing it in time to get back out there. The Argentine driver got out of the car, while an engineer from the Grove team was crouched analyzing the damage. In the repetition of the maneuver, the detachment of an element is clearly seen.

Franco stayed next to his track engineer analyzing data, while the 19 remaining drivers in the World Championship continued to rotate in the second round of practice, which ended with Lando Norris as the fastest, followed by his teammate Oscar Piastri. Colapinto, with just ten laps completed (he had done 24 in the first session) finished last.

When looking at the final time table, those two sectors that Colapinto marked with a record left him fourth in the first set and sixth in the second. Without leaving the track, I was calmly ready to repeat the morning’s result. “It looks good for us. It was positive, we have a much better performance than in Qatar. I went off in turn nine, I hit the curb hard and had damage to the floor,” the Argentine analyzed after the round. Of Colapinto’s nine weekends in F1, including Abu Dhabi, he suffered a breakage in five. In Italy, Singapore, Austin and Mexico he left with his FW46 unscathed. The rest (Azerbaijan, Brazil, Las Vegas, Qatar and Abu Dhabi) suffered some damage at one point during the weekend. The one from Losail was the only one who received a rebound in a carom in which he had nothing to do with.

This Saturday the third session will be held in which Colapinto will have to make up for lost time, because he did not have the chance to work on the race simulation that everyone did during the second rehearsal. Then it will be the turn of the classification, with a no small fact: the man from Buenos Aires will have to penalize five positions on the grid because Williams debuted a new gearbox in the FW46, the seventh of the season when the limit is five. The same will happen with his teammate, Alex Albon, who reached sixth.