The Japanese Grand Prix is Jack Doohan’s fourth appearance as a Formula 1 race driver.
As opportunities to test and practice are so limited, it therefore came as a surprise when Alpine announced he would not take part in the first practice session this weekend. The team wanted to run its test driver Ryo Hirakawa at his home event, and chose to bench the rookie rather than his team mate Pierre Gasly, who will start his 156th grand prix on Sunday.Asked on Thursday whether the team’s decision would put him at a disadvantage, Doohan diplomatically toed the PR line. “In China, a similar situation and I only had 40 minutes before that [power unit] issue in the end and then we still did a solid sprint quali and qualifying.”
This was true, but Shanghai’s circuit is a totally different prospect to Suzuka. The Chinese track is wide with vast run-offs, while Suzuka is narrow, has far more quick corners and the run-off is very limited in places.
Doohan admitted that “on paper, it looks more difficult and it sounds more difficult.” It certainly looked and sounded more difficult when he suffered a monumental crash early in the second practice session.
He was only on his second attempt at a flying lap when his car snapped out of control as he turned into Suzuka’s fearsomely fast and unimpressively named turn one, which he approached at around 330kph. He made a heavy impact with the six-deep tyre barrier on the outside, ripping the left-rear portion of his A525 to pieces.
Mercifully, Doohan emerged unscathed. Indeed, he was well enough to ask his race engineer three times before he got out of the car what had caused him to lose control. Sparing his blushes, his engineer Josh Peckett replied: “We’re just looking at everything on our side here.”
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But as the footage from his car showed, Doohan hadn’t deactivated his DRS as he headed into the corner. There was no way to put this down to anything besides driver error. “It was a misjudgement of not closing the DRS into turn one,” team principal Oliver Oakes confirmed in a statement hours after practice had finished.
Rookies are inevitably more susceptible to crashing than experienced drivers. All six drivers who embarked on their first full seasons this year have already bent an F1 car at least once.
At a track like Suzuka it makes sense to give them every chance possible to build up to the limit. Alpine was the only team who deprived their rookie of an hour’s running on one of F1’s most punishing courses.
It’s not hard to see why Alpine wanted to grab the opportunity to run their Japanese test driver at his home track. But this could just as easily have been achieved using Gasly’s car.
Moreover, had Alpine swapped Hirakawa with Gasly instead, it would have helped them meet the FIA-imposed requirement to give practice opportunities to inexperienced drivers. Each team must run “a driver who has not participated in more than two championship races in their career” twice in each of their cars during the season.
Alpine had already fulfilled this requirement on Doohan’s car before reaching Suzuka, as he had not yet started his third race when he took part in first practice in Shanghai. RaceFans has asked the team why it made this decision.
Long before Doohan started his first season of F1, rumours surfaced that he would not see it out, and be replaced by the likes of Franco Colapinto. This has frustrated Alpine, who claimed the speculation around its driver was “not fair.” But the strange decision they took at Suzuka is only going to add more fuel to that fire.
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David BR (@david-br)
4th April 2025, 16:10
It’s great so many rookies are entering Formula 1 but the teams seem to be asking far too much of them, verging on the irresponsible. Lack of practice time is now an issue in general. Teams and drivers need more. Cut a few races if necessary, I’d prefer it. All FIA/Liberty ‘money making first’ I guess.
Jere (@jerejj)
4th April 2025, 17:22
The only logical explanation for sacrificing Doohan for Hirakawa’s one-off practice outing over Gasly is the inevitability of Doohan getting sacked eventually to make way for Colapinto, but still totally illogical, not to mention useless considering the practice-running requirement that was already fully fulfilled for Doohan’s garage side.
However, not deactivating DRS in time for T1’s turning point was still all on him & had nothing to do with him not driving in FP1, so by two costly unforced errors combined with going into the grey area & overboard with rules, he’s only been giving more & more reasons for an early sacking.
Bruno 1Verrari
4th April 2025, 21:16
Nah – the second is money.
StefMeister (@stefmeister)
5th April 2025, 15:55
I think him not driving in FP1 may have contributed because usually the opening stints of FP1 are more about systems checks and gathering data rather than pushing so had he been part of that phase of the weekend he would have been slowly building up his pace rather than having to go straight into a push stint as he did jumping straight into FP2.
Jere (@jerejj)
8th April 2025, 19:11
@stefmeister My point was that he would’ve still done the exact same error, but in FP1 instead since he was determined he could survive T1 with DRS activated after his simulator session.
zot
4th April 2025, 18:31
his race engineer shout have warnt him to deactivate drs
SteveP
4th April 2025, 19:02
Unless you’re setting the guy up to fail.
Yeah, conspiracy theory stuff, but I can’t see any other reason that doesn’t involve team management having some kind of cognitive impairment.
Jere (@jerejj)
4th April 2025, 19:53
Same. I usually don’t buy into any sort of conspiracy theories, but this case is different due to the total absence of any other logical explanations.
Mr A
4th April 2025, 21:00
I don’t usually buy into conspiracy theories, unless Flavio.
Mooa42
4th April 2025, 21:31
I thought benching Doohan for fp1 made sense. Suzuka needs a good setup for the drivers to feel confident. Alpine was far more likely to make progress with setup with Gasly in fp1. Whether they had Doohan or Hirakawa in for fp1 probably made no difference for how the car was setup as they were unlikely to gather much information from either.
Doohan would have had lots of sim time and him not remembering to deactivate drs sort of further justify s him missing fp1. The only up side would have been that he was likely to have the same accident if he had done fp1 and the mechanics would have had more time to fix it.
Chris (@austin-healey)
4th April 2025, 21:59
Doohan said in another interview i read that he had gone flat out with DRS open on the simulator.
That’s why he was so shocked at the real world outcome,,,,
Patrick (@paeschli)
4th April 2025, 22:23
So no one (not the team looking over his simulator runs, not Gasly) told him this was a bad idea…?
SteveP
5th April 2025, 8:44
As I said earlier:
“Unless you’re setting the guy up to fail.” or “…team management having some kind of cognitive impairment.”
Mr Squiggle
5th April 2025, 14:01
The sky commentators have also picked up on this, that is, Jack was not manually switching off DRS in the simulator runs lat year. Was the team saying, that’s great Jack, well done?
If that is true, it just means he would have made the same mistake in FP1 if he was given the run and Ryo Hirakawa was put in Gasly’s car….
Wer
5th April 2025, 1:00
Here’s an idea for a business:
Build a current spec Formula 1 car, offer it for drivers to have test rides in it – as much as they want or actually: as much as they are willing to pay.
Have 4 or even 10 cars to disposal, rent a track, and you could also earn money from sponsorships or even fan fees at the venue.
I’m sure that even guys like Norris or Verstappen would like to have a potentially unlimited access to an F1 car practice time.
Had Andretti not been allowed into F1, it would’ve been a very intriguing opportunity for them!
SteveP
5th April 2025, 8:48
You have read the part of the regulations that limits the number of hours of testing, per driver haven’t you?
No?
Infinite test hours have passed into the pages of history, and started fading.
Racing Limits
5th April 2025, 10:11
It seems the rumours that Doohan wouldn’t finish the race have come true. Let’s wait for his and his team’s next moves.
Elvira
6th April 2025, 0:42
He tapped the brakes to shut off DRS as he’d done the previous hot lap and likely every recent simulator lap he’d driven in anger.
That there’s a pressure/duration threshold is a surprise – that Flavio’s Alpine took no responsibility is not.
Riker (@corsair)
8th April 2025, 16:19
They just need to ditch the whole DRS thing already.