- Alpine has extended Franco Colapinto’s contract through the 2027 Formula 1 season, keeping him paired with Pierre Gasly after a rookie year that swung between harsh public criticism and real progress on track.
- The new deal arrives months after Lando Norris called for Colapinto to face a race ban following a first-corner crash in Baku, a moment that set off a wave of online abuse aimed at the 23-year-old Argentine.
- Alpine’s Flavio Briatore pointed directly to Colapinto’s results in Miami and Montreal as the reason the team is ready to commit to him through 2027, telling reporters, “Franco belongs in Formula 1 and he belongs at this team.”
A Rough Year Just Earned Him Two More Seasons
Franco Colapinto’s first full year as an Alpine race driver played out mostly in public, and not kindly. After a late-race pileup at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix took out Lando Norris and Colapinto’s own teammate, Pierre Gasly, Norris stood in front of the cameras in Baku and said the driver at fault deserved a ban outright, adding that some drivers “shouldn’t be in Formula 1.” Colapinto did not need anyone to spell out whose name was about to get attached to that line. Within hours, a wave of abuse arrived in his messages and across his social media accounts, enough of it that Alpine put out a statement condemning what was being directed at him.
Norris walked the comment back two days later. “After the race, I sent Franco a message apologising for the comments I made that I simply should not have said,” he wrote, adding that “emotions were running high but that is not an excuse.” The two drivers, he said, had “come to a good understanding, and are still good friends.” Colapinto, for his part, later had to address the abuse publicly himself, asking fans and commentators to pull back from the hostility that had followed him from his rookie season at Williams in 2024 onward.
That episode sat at the center of a season that could have gone either way for Colapinto. Instead, on August 27, 2026, Alpine confirmed it was extending his contract through 2027, keeping him alongside Gasly, who is already committed to the team through 2028. The timing says something. A driver who spent the spring fielding questions about whether he belonged on the grid spent the fall being told, by the people who sign his paychecks, that he does.
Briatore’s Message Was Deliberate
Flavio Briatore, Alpine’s Executive Advisor and one of the most direct voices in the sport, did not hedge when he announced the extension. “We are very happy to confirm our driver line-up for 2027 with Franco staying as a race driver alongside Pierre,” he said. “For me, having consistency is very important. We have seen Franco truly grow and mature into a great driver this year.” Then came the line that counted most to anyone who had watched the Baku fallout play out. “Franco belongs in Formula 1 and he belongs at this team.”
Colapinto’s own response read like a driver exhaling after holding his breath for a long stretch. “I am very pleased to remain with this team in 2027,” he said. “I feel very happy and very settled here and it’s been even better that we have made significant progress this year.” He thanked the people who had backed him through the rough patches by name. “I am grateful to the team, Flavio and Steve for the trust placed in me,” he added, referring to Briatore and Alpine Managing Director Steve Nielsen.
Miami and Montreal Changed the Conversation
The results that convinced Alpine to commit came in back-to-back breakthroughs. In Miami, Colapinto crossed the line eighth and was promoted to seventh after a post-race penalty for Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc, a career-best finish at the time. He called it the most complete race weekend of his career. “I think since I got to F1 it’s been my most perfect weekend,” he said, crediting Alpine’s engineers for bringing a new chassis and upgraded parts over the break. Briatore, never one to let a good result sit without a challenge attached, told him the team needed that level “week in, week out from both drivers and the entire team.”
Colapinto answered that challenge in Montreal, where he finished sixth, a new career best, even after clipping the wall exiting the pit lane earlier in the weekend. Gasly finished eighth in the same race, giving Alpine a double-points result that pushed the team up the constructors’ standings. “It’s also my best result in Formula One, which makes me very happy and builds on the performance we showed in Miami,” Colapinto said afterward. “From where we started the weekend to having a double points finish for the team, is a great result and a fantastic reward.” By the time of the contract announcement, those results had helped him to 19 points across six races on the season.
The Long Road From Formula 2 to the Grid
None of this arrived out of nowhere. Colapinto spent 2024 racing in Formula 2, where six podium finishes and a sixth-place championship run caught the attention of Williams, who pulled him into their race seat that August, replacing Logan Sargeant. He became the first Argentine to drive in Formula 1 in 23 years, with the country’s last entrant having raced back in 2001. At Baku that September he scored points in just his second race weekend, becoming the first Argentine to score in Formula 1 in more than four decades, a gap stretching back to Carlos Reutemann in 1982.
What happened around those results counted for nearly as much as the results themselves. Argentine fans turned up in numbers that caught the sport off guard. More than 50,000 of them traveled from Buenos Aires to Sao Paulo for the Brazilian Grand Prix that November, chanting his name and packing the area around the Williams garage. Colapinto called the response “incredible, very lovely to see,” and Argentine companies including YPF, Mercado Libre and Globant moved quickly to back him with sponsorship money. When Williams did not retain him for 2025, Alpine signed him as a reserve driver that January, then handed him the race seat mid-season, replacing Jack Doohan ahead of the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix.
What Security Actually Buys a 23-Year-Old
It is worth sitting with what Colapinto has carried from the moment he first climbed into an F1 car. He is not just racing for points. He is racing in front of a fan base large enough to fill a grand prix weekend on its own, in a country that had gone more than two decades without a driver on the grid to cheer for. Every mistake gets magnified by that attention, and Baku showed how fast that magnification can turn hostile. A driver with a global platform called for his ban in public before a day had passed, and strangers online took that as license to pile on.
A two-year contract will not erase that memory, and it should not have to. What it does is give Colapinto something his rookie year never offered him: time. Time to make mistakes without each one becoming a referendum on whether he deserves his seat. Time to build on Miami and Montreal rather than treat them as one-off rescues of a reputation under threat. Gasly, already signed through 2028, gives Alpine a settled pairing heading into a period of regulation change in the sport, and Briatore’s own words, “consistency,” “grow,” “mature,” read like a team trying to signal exactly that kind of patience to its own driver as much as to anyone watching.
For Colapinto, the clearest marker of what has changed is not the results sheet. It is the tone of his own words. A driver who spent part of this year asking people to stop sending him abuse spent the fall saying he feels “very happy and very settled.” That is not the language of someone clinging to a seat. It is the language of someone who has been told, by the people who count most in his career, that the seat is his.
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