Franco Colapinto F1 driver biography

Franco Colapinto was unexpectedly given the chance to make his Formula 1 debut mid-way through his first season in Formula 2.

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Williams promoted their 21-year-old academy driver to a race seat after becoming frustrated with the form of Logan Sargeant, who was already due to leave the team at the end of the season.

Colapinto's route to F1

Colapinto began racing karts at the age of nine, and by 2018 had won the Argentinian Championship twice. That year he also won an exhibition electric karting race at the Youth Olympics, sharing his entry in the six-kart field with Maria Garcia Puig.

He moved up to racing cars at the end of the year, joining the Spanish Formula 4 championship for their final four races at the Navarra circuit. He scored a pair of fifth places on the opening day, then second place and a victory in the finale the day after.

Franco Colapinto, Can Amersfoort, start, Bahrain International Circuit, 2022 — Colapinto took pole on his debut in FIA F3

His promising debut attracted the attention of Fernando Alonso and the two-times Formula 1 champion supported him during his highly successful 2019 campaign. Colapinto won 11 times on his way to the title.

After starting his 2020 season in New Zealand’s Toyota Racing Series, where he placed third, Colapinto moved up to the Formula Renault Eurocup, where he won twice and also ended the year in third place. He continued in the category the following year, when it was renamed the Formula Regional European Championship, and won twice again, but fell to sixth in the points. This was partly due to his absence from the Monaco round, where his MP team withdrew him in protest after he was disqualified from the results of qualifying for a minor technical infringement.

In a busy year, Colapinto also raced in the Asian and European Le Mans series, and made his debut at the Le Mans 24 Hours, where he finished 12th overall in an LMP2 car entered by G-Drive, shared with Nyck de Vries and Roman Rusinov. But the following year he concentrated entirely on single-seaters.

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Franco Colapinto, MP, Imola, 2024 — Imola was the scene of Colapinto’s first F2 win

Colapinto impressed by taking pole position on his debut in the FIA Formula 3 series in Bahrain, though he wasn’t able to convert that into a feature race win. He did pick up two partial-reverse-grid wins, however. A pair of feature race wins in 2023 saw him end the year fourth in the standings.

By now he was racing in the colours of the Williams Racing Academy. The team gave him his first taste of an F1 car in the Young Driver Test at the end of the year.

He graduated to F2 the following year and quickly positioned himself among the front-runners. His sole victory came in the sprint race at Imola where he started second on the partially-reversed grid. However his qualifying performances gradually improved, helping him to a pair of second places in the feature races and sixth in the standings, ahead of F1-linked rookies such as Andrea Kimi Antonelli and Oliver Bearman.

Franco Colapinto's F1 career

Williams gave Colapinto his first opportunity to participate in an official F1 test session at Silverstone. He impressed them with his performance in tricky conditions at the high-speed track.

Meanwhile the team’s dissatisfaction with Sargeant’s performances was growing. It reached a peak at the Dutch Grand Prix when he dumped his car into a barrier at turn four, destroying an upgrade package the team had introduced that weekend.

The F1 paddock soon buzzed with rumours that Sargeant would be shown the door in favour of Antonelli, Mick Schumacher or Liam Lawson. Instead Williams chose to promote its junior driver for the final nine races of the season.

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