- Franco Colapinto posted a video pleading with his own fans to stop attacking other drivers and Alpine personnel online, saying the abuse is hurting rather than helping his career.
- The plea follows separate incidents involving teammate Pierre Gasly after the Spanish Grand Prix and Lando Norris after a multi-car crash in Azerbaijan that eliminated all three drivers.
- Alpine advisor Flavio Briatore reportedly threatened a full media blackout around Colapinto if the abuse aimed at other drivers did not stop.
A plea aimed at his own supporters
Franco Colapinto has spent the past two seasons becoming one of Formula 1’s most closely watched young drivers, carried by a fanbase in Argentina large enough to reshape television numbers whenever he races. That same fanbase has now become the subject of a video he posted asking it, in plain terms, to stop. “Instead of supporting me, we end up criticising people and attacking other drivers, other colleagues,” Colapinto said, addressing his own supporters directly rather than the trolls a driver might normally be expected to call out.
“I know you think you’re defending me, but you’re actually doing the opposite. You’re not helping me or my future,” he continued. It is an unusual message for a 23-year-old driver to have to deliver this publicly, not a complaint about being targeted himself but a warning that the people rallying around him are making his position inside the sport harder, not easier.
Two incidents, one pattern
The wave of abuse the video addresses traces back to two separate on-track moments this year. The first came after the Spanish Grand Prix in Madrid, when Alpine teammate Pierre Gasly was not moved aside to let Colapinto past, the two cars running different strategies at the time. Gasly, racing for his own result, held position, and a portion of Colapinto’s fanbase turned on him for it. The second followed a restart at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix in Baku, where Colapinto locked a wheel into Turn 1 and collected Gasly, triggering a chain reaction that also eliminated Lando Norris. All three cars were out of the race in an instant, and Norris initially said the move deserved a race ban before walking the comment back and apologizing.
Colapinto did not dodge responsibility for his part in the Baku crash. “As soon as we made contact, I came back to the garage, took full responsibility for it,” he said afterward. “It’s a mistake. I looked up in Turn 1. It was a mistake with just very big consequences.” On the conversation with Norris that followed, he described it simply: “Yeah, yeah, yeah, we chatted and it’s fine.” The drivers involved moved past the incident in the way drivers typically do. Their fans did not.
The team’s response, and the threat behind it
Behind the scenes, Alpine’s response has reportedly gone further than public statements. Team advisor Flavio Briatore is said to have threatened a complete media blackout around Colapinto if the online attacks aimed at his own teammate and rivals did not stop, an unusually direct intervention from a senior figure who has spent the season managing a seat that was itself the subject of speculation after the Baku crash, with reports suggesting a benching had not been ruled out. Colapinto raced the following round regardless, and has continued to speak about Briatore in supportive terms. “Flavio is a great team leader,” he said.
That loyalty cuts both ways. Briatore’s willingness to threaten a media blackout over fan conduct suggests the team sees the abuse as a genuine risk to the relationships Colapinto needs inside his own garage, not a minor distraction. A driver who collects points for one team but draws hostility toward a teammate he has to share strategy calls and equipment with all season is a harder driver to build a car around, regardless of how fast he is on a single lap.
Stepping back by choice
Colapinto’s answer has been to pull away from the platforms where the abuse lives. “Obviously, some time ago, I made the decision to step away from social media and take a break from it,” he said. “I want to focus on what really matters to me: my dream, my racing career.” He closed the video with a line that doubled as both reassurance and warning to the people posting on his behalf: “So I wanted to let you know that you won’t be missing me for long,” a promise that his focus would return to results rather than noise, and an implicit request that his fans do the same.
The pattern is not unique to Colapinto. Alpine has had to address hostile messages aimed at more than one of its own drivers this year, and the sport’s governing bodies have jointly condemned fan abuse through campaigns explicitly built around the idea that every name attached to a bad qualifying lap or a first-lap crash belongs to an actual person reading the replies. Teammates have faced similar pile-ons after contact involving Colapinto earlier in the year, and other young drivers across the grid have described comparable waves of harassment tied to on-track incidents involving fellow Argentine or regional fan bases whose devotion to a single driver spills over into hostility toward whoever that driver races against.
What a 23-year-old carrying a nation’s hopes is up against
Colapinto’s rise has carried real significance for Argentine motorsport, which has not had a grand prix winner of its own generation to rally behind in the way his fans have rallied behind him. That is precisely what makes his message land differently than a standard anti-harassment statement. He is not disowning the devotion. He is telling the people who care about him most that the shape their support has taken is working against the thing they actually want, which is to see him succeed on track long enough to justify the attention in the first place.
Head-to-head against Gasly this season, Colapinto trails in both grands prix and sprints, numbers that reflect a difficult year inside one garage rather than a driver out of his depth. Races like Baku complicate the comparison further, as a shared retirement erases any head-to-head reading for that weekend entirely. None of that will change on the strength of a video alone. What might change is whether the next mistake, inevitable in a career still being built in public, arrives without a fresh round of attacks landing on his own teammate’s replies. Colapinto has made clear he would rather be known for what happens on the circuit than for what his supporters do off it, and his own plea is the clearest signal yet that he is willing to spend some of his popularity to make that point stick.
A career still being written under a spotlight he did not fully choose
Colapinto arrived in Formula 1 as a mid-season replacement at Williams, impressed enough in a handful of races to keep his name in paddock conversations through a winter of uncertainty, and eventually landed the Alpine seat that put him alongside Gasly for 2026. That path, compressed and public from the start, gave him a following before he had the results to match it, which is part of why the gap between his profile and his results has become such a visible talking point every time something goes wrong on track. A more gradual rise through junior categories might have given him room to make the same mistakes away from a fanbase already ready to defend him at any cost.
There is also a broader reckoning happening across the sport that this episode feeds into. Formula 1’s own campaigns against online abuse have multiplied in recent years, and drivers from multiple teams have described receiving threats serious enough to involve police or team security rather than simple comment moderation. Colapinto’s plea takes a different shape: it does not ask the sport to protect him from outsiders. It asks his own corner of that audience to recognize what its reaction looks like from the other side of the screen, aimed at a teammate or a rival who had nothing to do with starting the fight in the first place.
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