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The pressure on Formula 1 juniors has grown exponentially in recent years as it has become surprisingly rare for proteges, even the most successful ones, to graduate to the top of the pyramid.
Throw in fervent backing from fans in a country already associated with immensely passionate support, fans who are aching for their first F1 driver in more than two decades, and the spotlight intensifies.
And when such a driver gets an opportunity “on another planet”, driving in an official practice session for the first time, at their team’s home race, with just a week’s notice…well, the stakes do not get much higher.
Friday practice outings can be a hiding to nothing for young drivers who are underprepared or too eager to impress. There’s little that can be done to catch the eyes and a whole host of things that can go just wrong enough to look utterly unremarkable - or worse, out of their depth.
Four young Formula 2 drivers had such a chance at the last race, the British GP, and the standout among them - beyond the obviously ready-for-F1 confirmed 2025 Haas driver Ollie Bearman, who has already raced in F1 for Ferrari - was Franco Colapinto, the driver who, on the face of it, should have been most vulnerable to all of the above.
Argentina’s big new hope was rewarded for a quietly excellent rookie F2 season with only his second F1 run with Williams, having taken part in last year’s post-season young driver test in Abu Dhabi.
It’s not uncommon for fans from an underrepresented country to be among the most vocal, and for the driver to become more of a symbol than you might normally expect of someone in lower categories. Colapinto, fifth in the F2 standings with a sprint race win and two feature race podiums to his name, is in that category.
“It seems that, as you say, in certain countries, you are a little bit more having the country on your shoulders,” Williams sporting director and driver academy head Sven Smeets tells The Race.
“And we saw massive, massive spikes on social media.
“It's maybe one of the reasons why we didn't announce it four weeks upfront, because then that pressure is [reduced] announcing it just a week off.
“We probably also helped a little bit the situation for him.”
Colapinto was only told of his FP1 chance a few days before, on Sunday at the preceding Austrian Grand Prix. He had two focused days in the simulator in the week to prepare. And then he was at the track, trying to juggle the dual demands of his main F2 programme and his big public F1 break.
That meant two sets of engineering commitments on Thursday and an intense on-track schedule on Friday: F2 practice at 10am, his F1 chance in Logan Sargeant's FW45 at 12.30pm, then F2 qualifying at 3.05pm. And Silverstone is so vastly spread out that he could not walk to and from the two paddocks - he had to be shuttled between.
Why dwell on those details? Because how Colapinto handled that, and managed to turn in one of his best F2 weekends of the season as well as impress in the F1 car, clearly stood out to Williams.
Colapinto at the British GP
F2 practice - 20th
F1 practice - 18th (+0.429s behind Albon)
F2 qualifying - 4th
F2 sprint race - 5th
F2 feature race - 4th
“Some drivers would probably say, ‘OK, I'm really really happy’ [to have the F1 chance] but that comes with a lot of stress,” says Smeets.
“And we've seen that to do F2 and an FP1, sometimes it worked, but most of the time people are struggling with switching between cars.
“If I look how Franco went on Thursday, when he came to the engineering briefings with us, how he worked with Logan's engineer, how he handled that week starting from Monday morning, he did very well.
“We were impressed by how calm he stayed during it. He did very well, I am very pleased.
“He did the full programme, he got all the procedure right, all the changes that we asked him to do during the sessions, and his times for the first time - just having done the sim and only driven a Formula 1 car once in Abu Dhabi during the young driver test - were very good.”
And so that performance. Colapinto’s headline time was indeed quite impressive, lapping around four tenths from regular driver Alex Albon. This was better than the more experienced Jack Doohan did for Alpine, by comparison, and he looked a lot more proactive and confident behind the wheel than Isack Hadjar - the F2 points leader after Silverstone - did in Sergio Perez’s Red Bull.
Hadjar’s apparent lack of confidence in the RB20, having impressed himself in an AlphaTauri FP1 run late last year, showed just how easy it is for a driver to get spooked in these circumstances, especially when switching between F2 and F1 machinery. But Colapinto did not look shaken at all. He lacked very little to Albon; a couple of tenths under braking at Brooklands, a small lift through Copse where Albon was full throttle, slightly overslowing it through Stowe and again a tiny bit more reserved under braking and on throttle navigating the final complex.
It reflected the kind of confidence gap that comes with inexperience. But you could not accuse Colapinto of driving in a reserved manner - he was attacking behind the wheel and really leaning on the car particularly at high speed. Moreover, he started at a decent level - within a second of Albon - and responded well to team feedback by improving at a good pace.
“What we're very happy with is how he started the session and how he ended it,” says Smeets.
“There was improvement all the time, there was improvement in every push lap, there was improvement in his long stint at the end. So, he did very well.”
If we're being hyper-critical, there were some slightly over-chatty radio messages to the team when asked for some balance feedback that often led to his race engineer interrupting him to advise him on approaching traffic - but even this was dealt with impressively, as Colapinto never panicked, and actually quickly resumed his debriefing where he left off.
It indicated he had reasonable spare capacity, which is always a good sign, and the feedback was at least useful. It just could have been more concise. Smeets acknowledges that, but adds it is the kind of thing that comes with experience.
Colapinto's junior career so far
2019 - 1st in Spanish F4
2020 - 3rd in Formula Renault Eurocup
2021 - 6th in Formula Regional European
2022 - 9th in F3
2023 - 4th in F3
2024 - 5th in F2 (ongoing)
The obvious question, then, is when Colapinto will get another F1 chance?
He was prioritised over fellow Williams junior Zak O’Sullivan for Silverstone because the team was putting performance over sentiment (Silverstone being O’Sullivan’s home race).
If Colapinto continues to be the better prospect then more FP1 outings or that post-season young driver test may well be in his future. He’s certainly done his cause no harm.
And Williams has an old car testing programme starting next year, so there will be more mileage sooner or later for him to get stuck into - and for his fans to get excited about.
