Alpine’s Colapinto deal is a pressure cooker for Doohan, but is it fair to him?

There’s one significant detail about Franco Colapinto‘s move to Alpine – and that’s his current job description at Enstone probably not being what he and his managers are really aiming for.

“If Franco is not in a racing seat next year, we’ll have a historic car, two-year-old car,” Colapinto’s now former boss James Vowles, from Williams, said at a press conference in Qatar. “He’ll be running that plenty in order to get a lot of speed. I’ve done this before in a previous life with Esteban [Ocon at Mercedes] when he took a year out. Effectively, Esteban’s here today and still a strong driver. There are things we can do effectively around it to maintain his strength.”

To be a reserve driver and have the opportunity to drive an old car to gain some mileage, Colapinto could just as easily have stayed with Williams. It would have also made perfect sense for the team. Even with what Vowles believes to be the best line-up in F1, it wouldn’t hurt to keep a reserve who has already proven he can be thrown into the car and deliver at any given moment.

There can only be one logical explanation. Colapinto and his camp must be confident that he’ll have a better chance of getting a race seat at Alpine in the near future than at Williams. And that’s backed up by Vowles’ words, provided to the media by his team’s communications department on the day of the announcement.

“We believe this agreement with Alpine represents Franco’s best chance of securing a race seat in 2025 or 2026,” he was quoted as saying.

And that is as good a hint as any. Colapinto, who impressed on his F1 debut as Logan Sargeant’s replacement, stands a real chance of driving one of Alpine’s race cars in the near future. And it’s not too hard to work out which seat he’s aiming for. It has to be Jack Doohan’s.

There are two ways of looking at this, of course. The cynical way – most commonly used in F1 – is to suggest that the Australian’s fate is all but decided. The widespread rumour that circulated around the paddock during the final rounds of the championship suggested that Doohan was guaranteed only a limited number of races by his Alpine contract.

Some cynics – and there are many in F1, as you can imagine – have even dared to link this to the team’s decision to hasten Ocon’s departure. It was suggested that by putting Doohan in the car in Abu Dhabi, Alpine’s advisor Flavio Briatore was simply setting him up for failure and thus bringing his future sacking closer. Team boss Oliver Oakes even faced this question in his post-race media session.

There’s also a chance that Doohan can still dictate his own future by showing results. But in any case, even if Briatore isn’t as cynical as some others, it’s clear that Colapinto’s arrival has put extra pressure on Doohan. The Argentinian simply wouldn’t be in the team if Briatore didn’t see him as one of his future race drivers.

“The only thing that’s certain is death,” Flavio jested in an interview with French newspaper Le Parisien in December, before becoming more serious. “We’ll start the year with Pierre and Jack, I can guarantee this. Then we’ll see during the season. I must put the team in a position to get results. And the driver is the one who must materialise the work of nearly 1,000 people behind him.

“Everyone works for just two people. If one of the drivers is not moving forward, is not bringing results, then I replace him. You can’t be emotional in F1.”

And that is not a nice thing to say, to put it mildly.

Jack Doohan, Reserve Driver, Alpine F1 Team

Photo by: Simon Galloway / Motorsport Images

It’s surely not easy to be Jack Doohan at the moment. Media speculation that his seat was under threat began even before his debut in Abu Dhabi, and it’s common knowledge in the paddock that Briatore subjected him to a sort of back-to-back test with Pierre Gasly, so that the team could assess his speed against their leading driver. This was linked to the Italian’s interest in Colapinto.

Those rumours have since materialised in the form of a reserve driver deal for the Argentinian, and all of this means that Doohan doesn’t really have much time to ease into things. He needs to deliver.

There’s every reason to believe that Alpine will want Jack to perform from the very first races, without excuses. Because if he doesn’t, in Colapinto Briatore and Oakes have someone who has already proven that he can perform when thrown in at the deep end. No, his nine-race stint with Williams wasn’t perfect – and a couple of crashes, particularly in Brazil and Vegas, slowed the hype train down a little – but the potential is there and already known.

Cynics won’t fail to mention that Briatore is perhaps also attracted by the potential commercial benefits of Colapinto’s possible promotion to a race seat. The impact of his debut was huge – both in Argentina and in F1, with logos of companies from his homeland not only appearing on Williams cars but also adorning billboards at tracks that hosted races Colapinto took part in.

And while F1 itself can’t influence Alpine’s decisions, the championship bosses shouldn’t be too disappointed to see Colapinto back on the grid.

It won’t be easy for Doohan. The Australian has spent 2024 on the sidelines, and he’s bound to be a bit race-rusty. Even Fernando Alonso was when he returned to the F1 grid in 2021 after his WEC and Dakar endeavours. It took the two-time F1 champion a few races to get up to speed with the same team, but it may well be that Doohan won’t have as much time. And he also has a lot to learn about F1.

Brutal? Probably. One thing that is certain, however, is the new Alpine F1 bosses’ consistency in their approach. After all, they are only doing what is beneficial for the team, without worrying too much about the optics.

Fabio Briatore and Oliver Oakes, Alpine’s advisor and team principal

Photo by: Erik Junius

However, putting Doohan under pressure is by no means the equivalent of shutting down Renault’s own F1 engine operation in Viry-Chatillon.

You could bemoan the historical importance of this decision, arguing that Renault is messing with its own legacy. You could also claim that using customer engines instead of its own is not the right approach for a manufacturer, and you would probably be correct in saying that it demonstrates Renault’s lack of ambition in F1.

But is it explainable? Absolutely, yes. Easily, in fact. It’s simple maths. If you can buy a seemingly competitive power unit for around £15 million a year, you don’t really want to spend five times that amount developing your own, with almost no guarantee that it will even be as competitive.

The customer deal doesn’t look great, especially for what is supposed to be a works team. But it saves a lot of money.

That’s largely been the story since Briatore’s arrival: the new Alpine regime doesn’t really care about how its decisions are perceived, as long as the benefits are clear.

If you’re Jack Doohan, that’s a lot to deal with. It would probably have been nicer for Briatore to say – in this very same interview with Le Parisien, for example – that the Australian had at least one season to prove himself. That would certainly have boosted the rookie’s confidence. It would look better if he’d said they had full faith in the talent developed by Alpine’s own academy. After all, Jack is the first graduate of the programme’s current iteration to make it to F1 with the team itself rather than with another one.

But Briatore didn’t. Nevertheless, he has guaranteed that Doohan will start the season alongside Gasly. And that is as good as it gets in F1. Even if Doohan doesn’t get a ‘fair’ chance to prove himself, he’s still got it. And even if he’s only got five races to prove his worth, that’s exactly five more than Theo Pourchaire and Felipe Drugovich got combined.

Jack Doohan, Alpine A524

Photo by: Lubomir Asenov / Motorsport Images

Like it or not, there’s something about the new Alpine leadership that sets it apart from all the previous ones: there’s no hypocrisy. There are no X-year plans, no unfounded proclamations about the number of races separating the team from future success.

As Oakes told Autosport magazine in an interview: “There’s no master plan. There’s no stuff that’s been said before, ‘100 races’ and all that. We just have to get better. We have to be a well-run team. And I think we just have to focus on ourselves. And even with all the noise about the power unit and all the talk about selling and all that sort of rubbish, I think people have already seen that we’re just not really going to be bothered by that anymore. We’re just going to keep our heads down.”

With Briatore’s arrival, the Alpine Formula 1 team has – perhaps for the first time in the last decade – been given a clear and straightforward plan: to become an efficient operation that aims to achieve the best results it can with the resources it has. Whether some decisions prove to be unpopular is now irrelevant to them.

F1 is called a cut-throat business for a reason. But it’s also performance-driven. So if you’re Jack Doohan, your future is still in your hands. All you have to do is drive fast.