Franco Colapinto shines in Madrid, Pierre Gasly frustrated despite Alpine's good pace

Franco Colapinto had one of his best weekends in F1 at the Spanish Grand Prix: qualifying ninth, the Argentine finished seventh after a solid race, even ahead of Oscar Piastri.

Alpine continues its good momentum: in Madrid, Franco Colapinto confirmed the team’s recent progress with a particularly convincing seventh place.

Thanks to this result, Alpine is now nine points behind Racing Bulls in the constructors’ championship. Pierre Gasly, only 12th, believes his pace deserved much better.

An optimal weekend for Colapinto

After qualifying ninth, the Argentine driver was able to take advantage of his good race pace to gain two positions and score important new points for his team. His result also allows him to erase the disappointment of Monza, where a mistake during the race had deeply affected him.

This time, Colapinto feels he executed an almost perfect weekend: “I am very happy, the team did an incredible job, I maximized everything I could do, I am very proud of this result and very excited for the future”, he said.

The Argentine also highlights his progress in understanding the A526: “It’s going well, I think we can continue to improve in Baku and in the following races, and achieve better results. I feel good with the car and I am learning.”

This seventh place allows Alpine to get even closer to Racing Bulls, with now only nine points separating the two teams in the constructors’ championship.

Gasly convinced Alpine had more to offer

Pierre Gasly’s weekend was more frustrating. Starting from the seventh row, the Frenchman eventually finished 12th despite believing he had a very competitive pace during the race.

According to him, Alpine was even the best team behind the four leading teams at certain moments of the event: “It was just frustrating because we were extremely fast in the race, we were unlucky with the virtual safety car. After the VSC, we were the fastest, we tried something and it didn’t work.”

The Frenchman particularly feels that the final result does not reflect the performance level of his car: “Yesterday, we messed up with tire warm-up, and I need to see what we did on the car, we had different wings this weekend. But with Hard tires today, we were a second faster than the rest of the pack, but we didn’t benefit from those efforts.”

Gasly therefore highlights two main factors to explain his 12th place: a disappointing qualifying and bad timing with the virtual safety car.

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