Alpine team boss Flavio Briatore’s pointed declaration that he’ll “consider what course of action should be taken” over Franco Colapinto taking out team-mate Pierre Gasly (and Lando Norris) in the Azerbaijan Grand Prix suggests there might be more trouble to come for Colapinto, who already has a five-place grid penalty for the incident.
Gary Anderson had to deal with a few intra-team clash headaches in his time on the F1 pitwall. Here’s his take on the Colapinto incident and both the FIA and Alpine’s handling of it so far.
The one golden rule in Formula 1 and motorsport in general is ‘don’t wipe out your team-mate’. It shouldn’t be down to whether the official penalty fits the crime.
A team needs to have some discipline of its own in place, and the drivers need to buy into it. All the teams are bigger than any of their drivers, so it’s all about respect, but racing is racing. For any driver on the grid, they want to beat the other 21 cars that are out there and in reality that is why a driver gets their place on the grid.
We have seen some very close racing between team-mates this season. We’ve seen it more often with the frontrunning cars, but that’s just because that’s who the TV director follows.
Think George Russell and Kimi Antonelli, Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc on more than one occasion, even Max Verstappen and Isack Hadjar this weekend, but it happens all the way through the field; these cars and the power units seem to mean that the grid is made up a bit like Noah’s Ark, and when that happens it will bleed through to the race itself.
We saw many drivers make mistakes in Baku; Lando Norris, Hamilton and Oscar Piastri, to name but a few, all had lock-ups that sent them down the run-off areas or over the kerbs.
For Colapinto, it was a mistake at the wrong time, but when you lock a wheel, you become a passenger. So should he not have tried to make up some places and in turn, lost a few on the safety car restart? No, that’s not how a racing driver’s brain is wired.
For me, it is the same for Racing Bulls team-mates Arvid Lindblad and Liam Lawson and their incident at the same time. Lindblad didn’t mean to hit his team-mate; it just happened that that was the car that was there when he got a little excited about life.
While he was a helpless casualty of Alpine’s intra-team clash, I think Norris’s post-race outburst calling for a race ban for Colapinto is out of place. Norris has had his close shaves on various occasions, so when you live in a glass house, the first thing you learn is not to throw stones.
In my time running a team, we had it on many occasions. Jordan team-mates Ralf Schumacher and Giancarlo Fisichella in Argentina in 1997 was probably the worst; it robbed us of a potential win or at least two drivers on the podium. Schumacher still finished third but with the pace and strategy we had, both drivers were in contention that day.
We also had a few close scrapes with Eddie Irvine and Rubens Barrichello, but in general back in those days the stewards didn’t get involved, so it was all down to a quick get-together in the back of the truck whilst the blood was still boiling, with me telling them to sort it and quickly.
I’m not condoning what Colapinto did; he made a mistake at a time when there was no opportunity to get out of it, but for me it is up to the team to issue any reprimands.
That certainly seems to be the old-school approach executive advisor Flavio Briatore has taken, as he said Alpine will “consider what course of action should be taken, so we can learn from it and avoid such a situation in future”.