Franco Colapinto: “The goal is to be comfortable and happy with the car”

Alpine’s Argentine pilot arrives at the Belgium GP, 13th F1 date, after the unease of not being able to run in Silverstone and with the goal of taking advantage of the chances that appear in a rainy weekend and with Sprint.

Franco Colapinto reaches his seventh F1 Grand Prix with Alpine, but it will be his sixth career. The sadness, seasoned with anger, who lived in the GP of Great Britain is staying in the past. The Buenos Aires was in a good weekend in Silverstone, but everything was twisted in the classification with his error in Q1, when he clueless and stay in the last place. The team chose to remove the car from the grill to start from boxes and take the opportunity to change the power unit. But the A525 could not leave Pits: a problem in the box left it without making a meter of competition. The two weeks of the break served Collapinto to work in Estone, take out the muffle and thus arrives at Spa-Francorchamps, where this weekend the 13th date of the World Cup will be played.

“They are car races and sometimes these coasts pass,” Colapinto said with a talk with AM850 about what happened in Silverstone. “It gives a lot of anger because I could not start and I wantedhe added.

Alpine is comfortably the last team in the construction table with 19 points, ten less than Haas, the penultimate. Moreover, only two pilots of the 21 who participated in the 2025 exercise of F1 did not add points: Jack Doohan and Franco Colapinto, the two companions that Pierre Gasly had in the second A525. The Frenchman is the owner of all the beans scored by the team led by Flavio Briatore.

“There are circuits in which we are more vulnerable as a spa, which is going thoroughly, but you have to maximize opportunities. It will be a complicated weekend with the sprint and with the rain that is announced. It was good to have a break, restart and be ready for Spa. I think there were clues in which different weaknesses were seen in the car. Silverstone ended up being a good weekend for Pierre. He took a classification step and saved the weekend. It was not clear that we were competitive, the rain helped to give one more step. In these two weeks we work with the team at weak points, “Franco explained.

Belgium will be the third of the six dates marked on the agenda with Sprint race. Therefore, there will barely a batch of training this Friday and a while later the classification for the short competition of Saturday will be carried out. And, to top it off, the rain, almost a classic of each visit to the Ardenas forest. “I love spa, integrate those circuits that have a lot of history in sport. Going through Eau Rouge in a formula 1 is something very special. The weather will be changing the whole weekend. You have to focus and hopefully you can give one more step.”

Colapinto made a balance of its first six weekends with Alpine: “They were not the careers I expected, but on every weekend I stayed with things. And in the end it is a package, the car, the team, the pilot has to adapt. Now the idea is to put everything together. The goal is to be comfortable and happy with the car as I was at the beginning in Silverstone that was what there was and Pierre followed me in the things he did. I would have loved to run in Silverstone for the experience of trying with rain, which was important for Spa. I like to run with water, in Silverstone I felt with confidence. Not running and not winning that experience of turning with water is a shame. But it can be a good weekend if we take advantage of opportunities, “he said.

The Belgian date will be continued by Hungary in consecutive weeks and, then, the boreal summer vacation will begin in which the teams are obliged by the FIA to close their plants to give vacations to employees. Although for Franco they will be job weeks: “Two important races and recess to continue working in my case, because I am not going to have vacations. I want to continue finding performance in the car. There are circuits in which we are more vulnerable as a spa, which is thoroughly, but you have to maximize opportunities.”

The dream of having F1 in Argentina

Four days before the start of the activity of the Belgium GP, the announcement of remodeling works of the Buenos Aires Autodrome, the return of MotoGP in 2027 and the marked interest of raising the return of Formula 1, a category that does not run in Argentina since 1998, with victory by Michael Schumacher. Colapinto was consulted at a press conference on the project.

“It seems great to me that MotoGP runs in Buenos Aires, where there are so many fans. Taking back to formula 1 will be more difficult, but it would be fantastic if it was achieved. It is one of my dreams,” said the Argentine.