Franco Colapinto concedes Alpine performance is ‘tricky to tell’ despite ‘very helpful’ pre-season tests

Colapinto concedes Alpine performance is ‘tricky to tell’ despite ‘very helpful’ pre-season tests

Franco Colapinto addressed early hopes that Alpine have taken a major step forward after his first pre-season testing.

Franco Colapinto has admitted that despite early signs of promise, it’s “tricky to tell” how competitive Alpine will be compared to their midfield rivals as they target a significant improvement from last season.

While this year will mark the Argentine’s third on the grid – following a stint at Williams in 2024 and replacing Jack Doohan from round seven in 2025 – it will be his first as a full-time driver, which allowed him to make his pre-season testing debut.

All 11 teams were focused on learning how the redesigned power units perform on track, but Alpine had the additional challenge of switching suppliers with the Enstone outfit becoming a Mercedes customer team.

They completed more than 1000 laps across the Barcelona shakedown and six days of testing in Bahrain, with Colapinto running 650km in a single day. Team mate Pierre Gasly clocked similarly extensive mileage with competitive lap times, so the early signs may suggest that Alpine have improved from the tail end to around the top of the midfield.

Reflecting on his first pre-season test, Colapinto said: “I think adaptation will be key in this early part of the season. Changing track to track, everything changes – the way you drive, the deployment. We'll see.

“We'll need to learn a lot in the sim as well before the race comes. Our performance is tricky to tell.

“I think there are four teams quite far ahead, and it's the rest of the teams that are also very close together. We'll need to wait and see in Race 1 where we really are.”

Alpine were comfortably at the bottom of the competitive order last season, accumulating 22 points at the hands of Gasly to end the year 48 adrift of their closest rivals, Kick Sauber. But with plenty of laps under his belt, Colapinto seemed hopeful that both he and the team can achieve much better results in 2026.

“It really helped, I think, to arrive at Race 1 with mileage,” he said in Bahrain. “I'm much closer to what the other guys have been learning and running.

“I think it's already like eight races in terms of mileage, so it does help a lot. That's something I've been missing last year and the year before, so it's a big step.

“It feels different, of course, from last year, but I think the progress is very steep. From one day to another, things change and the car is a bit quicker and it's feeling better.

“So again, I think in a few races, we will feel even better than now and we will start to get more used to it, get more comfortable and quicker, especially. So yeah, I think it's too early to compare too much to last year, but it's definitely improving.”

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