Aron? Bottas? Colapinto’s F1 future clarified with Alpine mission set

Franco Colapinto’s position at Alpine is understood to be assured for the second half of the F1 2025 season, as he pursues greater confidence behind the wheel.

The Argentine driver, as well as his Alpine seat predecessor Jack Doohan, is the only currently active driver on the grid to be without a points-scoring result in F1 2025.

Franco Colapinto working to find confidence with Alpine A525

Having burst onto the scene with Williams as a mid-season replacement for the under-performing Logan Sargeant last year, Colapinto found his way back onto the grid earlier this year when Alpine opted to drop Australian rookie Jack Doohan for the highly-rated Argentine.

However, the driver swap has yielded little by way of results in the eight race weekends since, with Colapinto remaining mired on zero points, his best results have been a pair of 13th-place finishes in Monaco and Canada.

In contrast, his more experienced teammate Pierre Gasly has scored three points finishes in that time, including a season-best sixth-place at the British Grand Prix. Gasly has scored all 20 of Alpine’s points this year, with the Enstone-based squad 15 points down on ninth-placed Haas.

Speculation has swirled in recent weeks that Colapinto could be replaced for the second half of the F1 2025 season, with current Mercedes reserve driver Valtteri Bottas tipped as a potential replacement.

This speculation has been further fuelled by Colapinto crashing his A525 during a Pirelli tyre test in Budapest this week, compromising the data gathering exercise for the tyre manufacturer.

As a known solid quantity, Bottas would offer Alpine some insight into just how good the A525 car actually is, given the lack of comparison offered against Gasly’s performances by both Doohan and Colapinto.

But sources have indicated to PlanetF1.com that the rumours of a Bottas switch are without basis in fact, and Colapinto is set to continue in his seat for the second half of the season, without any fears that he could be dropped at short notice.

The understanding is that Colapinto will be given every opportunity to showcase his talents, with the team evaluating its options for the F1 2026 season. Should Colapinto start to find his feet, he stands a good chance of being retained alongside Gasly for next season.

However, should he continue to struggle for pace and consistency throughout the second half of the year, there is a possibility of a driver swap in the final rounds of the year.

The likely candidate for this would be current reserve driver Paul Aron, who has recently started to make appearances with Sauber for the Swiss team’s mandatory rookie driver outings in FP1.

With Colapinto still the preferred option, having been signed on a deal with Enstone, understood to be five years in duration, it’s only in the worst-case scenario of a complete and utter failure to improve that Aron could get the nod to try showcasing his abilities in the final two to three races of this year.

For the moment, Colapinto will continue plugging away at trying to unlock some of the comfort with the A525 he had when he initially stepped into the car back in May, with the Argentine speaking about his predicament heading into the summer break during the Hungarian Grand Prix weekend.

“We’re still not doing everything perfectly,” Colapinto told the media, including PlanetF1.com, in Budapest.

“There are just moments in a weekend when we are reading things wrong, and it’s compromising our weekend.

“I just don’t really find a weekend that I feel we’ve done everything perfectly at the moment, or like we maximised everything that we had, and that’s what I’m trying to work with, to get better with the team.”

Recently, Colapinto was warned by former F1 Grand Prix winner Riccardo Patrese that Renault executive advisor Flavio Briatore is “like a bomb that can explode at any minute”, inferring that Colapinto’s seat can’t be assumed to be safe if the Italian’s patience suddenly runs out.

It led Colapinto to insist that he’s not concerned about his future just yet, saying that Briatore has “been very supportive and he trusts in the decision he made.”

But while Colapinto may be safe for the moment, he is open about the fact that he is lacking confidence behind the wheel of the A525, a situation that he feels is yet to fully turn around despite recent improvements.

“I’m lacking confidence in the car, and I’m not finding my feet sometimes in some corners,” he said.

“I’m struggling to be able to turn in and to come into the corners, and that’s just not really given me much confidence.

“In a way, I didn’t have this issue last year; I could go straight in and be quick straight away and straightforward, and now I’m struggling a bit more with that. That’s the reality, I don’t have the confidence as I’ve had maybe last year, and that’s sometimes a bit how it goes in F1.

“We are getting a little bit better at it. It’s still this thing of not maximising the weekend as a whole, and we are not nailing every single session, and that’s what I feel that we really need to improve.

“I don’t feel like on a weekend that everything has been perfect on my side, or the strategy side, or on the setup side, it’s always been something that we could have done better, and that’s just part of the process as well.

“But it’s something we need to be improving. A part of the confidence that I sometimes lack, I think it’s something we are getting a little bit better at.”

More on Franco Colapinto and F1 2026

👉 F1 2026 driver line-up: Who is already confirmed for the 2026 grid?

👉 Franco Colapinto crash update as Pirelli confirm plan of action

Perhaps indicative of how F1 can be a hugely mental game, Colapinto said he felt his very first weekend with the Enstone squad, at Imola, had actually been his best as he went in without any preconceptions about performance.

“It’s been getting better, but it’s something that we are still finding how to get even better at it. If I just go backwards, I feel Imola has been almost my best weekend,” he said.

“It’s the first time I drove the car in a long time, the first time I drove the A525, the first time I was working with the team.

“It doesn’t really feel right, you know, my best moment, the closest to Pierre has been in my first race, so we are just trying to understand why. What’s the reason for that, and why I started to lose some confidence.

“There are some things that we can start to play with to make that better. I think, after Spa, we had a few changes that we see that it can relate a bit to how I started in that first race.

“It might get a bit better. If we knew, it would not be happening, and I would not be lacking that pace. We are trying to investigate and get better at that.

“Generally, the car is a bit tricky on entries, and that’s what we are working on my side, because it got a little bit trickier on the tracks I struggle [at] more basically.

“So it’s like a trend, when it gets a little bit worse, it’s where I lack a bit more performance, and, most of the time, I will relate that to those issues.

“Now, we had a clear picture at Spa where that was happening and where we need to get better, and we have brought some ideas to try and test them in free practice.

“I do believe that it’s there and that the car can do it, and it can be as I want. When I go back to Imola, before the front wing change and all these things, it was where I felt best, and it was very early.

“We are just working to try and understand that. I think once we do it, everything is gonna get easier. So let’s hope we get on that, we get that click that we need, and then I think it’s gonna go up from there.”

The F1 summer break sees all the teams and personnel engage in a mandatory two-week shutdown, with Colapinto getting the chance to fully switch off from everything aside from physical maintenance and training, and he acknowledged the importance of this switch-off as he gears up for the second half.

“The shutdown, it’s a way of resetting everything and starting back from a full reset. Maybe that is what I need, I don’t really know,” he said.

“I do believe that we’ve been getting better at some things, but it’s just that feeling that nothing has been connected or put back together.

“That package that we have, it’s been maximised at times, but not at other times. Maybe it’s a bit more critical, and it’s a work that is still in progress, but I feel that there is progress that is being done behind the scenes.

“It’s just that when you don’t see it in results, it’s very tricky to keep pushing, to keep working in the same direction, because you don’t actually see the results happening.

“But I do believe that we’ve been getting better in many areas, and we are still working very well with the team, and that it’s going to come, but it’s just taking longer than what they [Alpine] would like.”

Read Next: The ‘myriad reasons’ behind Mercedes’ delayed reveal of F1 2026 drivers