Pre-season, those amenable to a wager would have thought the odds on Jack Doohan being fired before Liam Lawson insufficiently lucrative to justify placing a bet. It seemed to be a dead cert, what with Alpine lining up Franco Colapinto as a ‘test and reserve driver’ within a month of Doohan’s low-key first race outing in Abu Dhabi.
In the run-up to Lawson’s demotion back to the Racing Bulls team, there was a good deal of Sturm und Drang about the possibility of Colapinto replacing him. Crucially, though, the source of the noise was Colapinto’s management, with the media acting as an amplifier over the rumours.
No, Colapinto has a three-year deal with Alpine, from which he can of course be extracted – but at a cost. His management are understandably keen to keep his name out there as a credible race driver, but an Alpine seat on an as-soon-as-possible basis remains the short-term goal.
While Doohan was among the first of this season’s rookies to be confirmed in a race seat – the announcement was late last summer – it’s widely believed a performance clause in his contract gives Alpine the option to replace him after six races. While the existence of such clauses for both parties in a contract is commonplace in F1, having the threshold so early is rather unusual.
So for a good three months before Doohan essayed his first laps as an Alpine race driver, his bosses were in the market for another eligible candidate. When Esteban Ocon was abruptly dumped after the Qatar GP so Doohan could take his place in Abu Dhabi, those members of the opinionati who were asleep at the wheel concluded that this was to enable Doohan to ‘hit the ground running’ in what was expected to be a tightly contested 2025 season.
In fact, Alpine ‘executive advisor’ Flavio Briatore was already well down the road to signing Colapinto by this point. Given the importance of the Latin American market to Renault, Alpine’s parent company, and the supposed honey pot of big-ticket sponsors there just waiting to throw money at F1, what’s not to like about a driver who is already Argentina’s second most famous sports personality?
Signing off Abu Dhabi by finishing 15th, from 20th on the grid, while his (admittedly) more experienced team-mate Pierre Gasly was seventh, was an inauspicious way to spend one of those six contractual ‘lives’. And while there have been some positives over the following two outings, they were accompanied by high-profile blunders.
Granted, Doohan qualified five places behind Gasly in Australia, but he had been quicker than Gasly in Q1 and was inconvenienced by a Lewis Hamilton-induced yellow flag in Q2, which skewed the picture somewhat. It seems unfair to lambast him too much for shunting in the race since he was neither the first nor the last to do so in difficult conditions.
In China he outqualified Gasly for the sprint race (albeit 16th vs 17th), then promptly lost two places on the opening lap and picked up a penalty for escorting Gabriel Bortoleto off track while trying a last-gasp pass for 17th on the final lap. The stewards handed Doohan a 10-second time penalty – irrelevant given his finishing position – and two penalty points.
There are those who would lament a penalty for attempting an overtake – “when you no longer go for a gap, you are no longer a racing driver” and all that – but such are F1’s closely prescribed regles de jeux these days. Doohan committed to outbraking Bortoleto at the Turn 14 hairpin, on the inside line, from so far back that the Sauber driver had clearly written off the possibility of an attack as he turned in on the usual line. To call Doohan’s move ‘optimistic’ would be charitable indeed.
“I need to have a look into it and see what happened so that it doesn’t happen again,” Doohan said afterwards.
And yet the very next day… whoops, he did it again. The circumstances were slightly different, since it came at a point where Doohan had spent around a third of the grand prix fending off Isack Hadjar, owing to Racing Bulls having failed to receive the memo that this race required just one pitstop. But the conclusion was similar, in that Hadjar found himself exploring the hinterlands of the Turn 14 run-off area, and the stewards took a similarly dim view.
Again, since Doohan finished 14th on the road, lost two places to the penalty, then gained three as a result of disqualifications ahead to be classified 13th, no points were squandered. The team did that itself, as Gasly was stripped of his ninth place after his car came up short on the weighbridge. And, given that Gasly had only recently been passed by Oliver Bearman’s Haas – a car with well-documented aero issues temporarily flattered by this circuit – this was not a weekend worthy of cracking open the champagne at Alpine’s Enstone HQ.
“I think, for me, there’s a lot of positives,” was Doohan’s take. “We haven’t had that result quite yet to really show it, but the inner circle understands that, and I think that’s what’s most important. The guys are super happy in the team, for sure.”
By ‘inner circle’ he means the likes of Briatore and team principal Oliver Oakes. When invited to comment on Doohan’s future, though, they are markedly less unequivocal about their happiness levels.
For the betting people out there, it seems to be a question of ‘when’ rather than ‘if’.
