Franco Colapinto is the driver most under pressure to perform heading into the new F1 season, out of Alpine, which finished last in 2025, and the fledgling F1 squads.<\/p>\n
Out of the six drivers who will race for Team Enstone, Audi and Cadillac, respectively, a majority of F1 fans singled out the Argentine driver as the one who most needs to impress when racing gets underway in Melbourne.<\/p>\n
It is a significant campaign ahead of Alpine, which has done away with its own power unit project in favour of becoming a Mercedes customer.<\/p>\n
Expectations are high, particularly from the other side of the team’s garage<\/a>, but many eyes will be on Colapinto, with a keen view to seeing how the 22-year-old performs.<\/p>\n Taken as part of the RacingNews365 series looking at which driver is under the most pressure heading into 2026, Heat 3 also saw Sergio Perez identified as a driver who has a point to prove.<\/p>\n Curiously, he is seen as being under considerably more pressure than Valtteri Bottas in the other Cadillac.<\/p>\n Both Colapinto and Perez will advance to the final, where they will face Lewis Hamilton, Isack Hadjar, Liam Lawson and Lance Stroll to determine which of those six will face the most scrutiny.<\/p>\n Check out the results from Heat 1 [HERE]<\/a> and Heat 2 [HERE]<\/a>, with the results of Heat 3 below!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Franco Colapinto is the driver most under pressure to perform heading into the new F1 season, out of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":391201,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[572],"tags":[64,63,827,830,828,831,829,826,813,823,825,806,805,824,803,804,822,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-391200","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-motosport","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-daniel-ricciardo","11":"tag-f1-calendar","12":"tag-f1-live","13":"tag-f1-results","14":"tag-f1-standings","15":"tag-ferrari","16":"tag-formula-1","17":"tag-lewis-hamilton","18":"tag-max-verstappen","19":"tag-motor","20":"tag-motor-sports","21":"tag-motorsport","22":"tag-motosport","23":"tag-motosports","24":"tag-racing","25":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=391200"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391200\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/391201"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=391200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=391200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=391200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}