Jack Doohan’s seat at Alpine should be secure until at least the summer, The Race understands, despite an incident-filled start to his rookie Formula 1 season.
Doohan’s place has been under scrutiny since before his F1 career really started as Alpine’s rookie driver seemed at risk of being replaced eventually by Franco Colapinto.
That began when Alpine’s Flavio Briatore showed interest in then-Williams race driver Colapinto late last year, and escalated when Colapinto joined as one of Alpine’s reserves in January.
By that point Doohan had made his grand prix debut in the 2024 season finale in Abu Dhabi and was guaranteed at least to start the 2025 campaign alongside Pierre Gasly.
But Colapinto’s arrival generated what team principal Oliver Oakes called a lot of “noise” around Doohan, which Oakes admitted the team had created for him.
Doohan’s situation was precarious given it is well known that Colapinto joined with the belief that a race seat was a strong possibility as early as this year, but it has never been as straightforward as him being guaranteed to be replaced.
While Briatore has been keen on Colapinto, others within Alpine have been determined to support Doohan as much as possible.
Senior trackside figures have been impressed by the speed he has shown at various points so far this season, and even surprised at times by how close he has been to Gasly, while also appreciating the way he has worked with the engineering team.
However, it was known that Doohan had amplified the pressure on himself with a spate of early incidents: a first-lap crash in Australia, penalties for collisions in the sprint race and grand prix in China, and a massive accident in practice in Japan due to his failure to close the DRS before Turn 1.
These setbacks could have been used to justify an early-season switch if there was universal agreement within Alpine that Doohan was struggling too much and that he should immediately be replaced by Colapinto, who has already brought some South American sponsorship to Alpine and would theoretically bring a lot more if he had a race seat.
Especially as the costs associated with Doohan’s accidents are significant, not just in a budget cap world but when resources are so precious as teams have a huge amount of development work to undertake for the new rules coming in 2026.
But while it was widely believed in the F1 paddock that Alpine did have a contractual option to replace Doohan as early as the Miami Grand Prix, that is not expected to happen.
Instead, Doohan is understood to have until around the middle of the season to use his incumbency to secure the seat for the rest of the year.
This is a result of the potential that Doohan has shown around the setbacks, the way he works with the team and the dynamic he has with Gasly. Doohan could have scored his first F1 points in Bahrain, where Gasly was seventh, but lost out a little with the timing of the safety car and could not fight the rearguard action required to keep cars on better tyres behind in the final stint.
“He's done a good job this weekend, and in general,” said Oakes, who has been keen to support Doohan.
“I know Japan FP1 caught him out a bit. But I think this weekend, particularly throughout qualifying, Q1, the first run of Q2 - I think the last run in Q2 he is a little bit disappointed, because it was just half a 10th [to getting to Q3].
“But then in the race as well, those first two stints, he was doing a really good job. At the end there, I think it was tricky. The safety car bunched everyone up. Competitiveness-wise, it was hard with those cars around you.
“But I think he's had a good weekend.”
A five-second penalty for exceeding track limits bumped Doohan even further back to 14th in the final classification, and he is one of only four drivers yet to score points this season.
But it is hoped that it is only a matter of time before he makes good on the promise that has been there so far.
“It was so good until it wasn't,” Doohan said of his Bahrain qualifying and race.
“So we just need to analyse and get this weekend to come together. There's some strong points, just very unfortunate with the hard [tyre in Bahrain] and also there's some things that I can look into to ensure that I can piece it all together.
“We're going into another hot race next weekend and we just look to try to build from this and continue where we've left off - maybe not in my ultimate finishing position today, but in our pace.”
