In his third season of Formula 1, current Alpine driver Franco Colapinto has made quite an impression on the fans and teams around him, and his path to where he is now has seen him go through some interesting challenges and problem-solving scenarios. From the unique way he washed his race suit to building an incredible rapport with his engineers and scoring the first points for Argentina in more than forty years, here are three facts about Colapinto that every fan should know about.
Colapinto’s unique way of washing his race suits
Colapinto moved from Argentina to Europe at the age of 14, and as a teenager living alone on a completely different continent, life can certainly get challenging. From learning how to cook for himself to figuring out laundry, Colapinto had a crash course in what adulthood was like when he was still just a kid.
And one of these lessons was something that almost everyone has experienced: shrinking something in the laundry. Unfortunately for Colapinto, it was a rather important piece of clothing: his race suit.
“Washing [the racing suit] is complicated,” he said to Antena 3 Internacional during a Spanish-language interview, “because I didn’t really know how to do it, and one day I put one in the washing machine, it got hot, and it shrank.”
To prevent the issue from happening again, he got a little innovative.
“When I was a kid, I stayed in hotels a lot, and sometimes you have to get a little creative. So I’d put shampoo on, and as it ran down, I’d shower with my racing suit on. Then I’d take it off, shower by myself, and dry it with a hair dryer. That’s why hotels hate me, although I don’t do it anymore.”
His feedback was so detailed that his even engineers asked him to make it shorter
When Colapinto first joined F1 halfway through the 2024 season, there was one thing that his new race engineer at Williams, Gaetan Jego, noticed immediately.
“He loves to talk,” said Jego to Motorsport.com's Spanish edition. “You’ll probably see that in the interviews.”
Indeed, Colapinto quickly became known for his long and detailed answers to reporters, but that extended beyond just the media pen and into the team’s garage. Luckily for the team, this also meant that Colapinto gave extremely detailed feedback on the car he was driving.
“He’s understanding the car really well and is very sensitive to how it behaves, which is extremely useful,” said Jego. “Even in the simulator, which is very different from the actual race car, he’s always quite detail-oriented and can give us good direction and help us understand the car’s limitations.”
But even this has its downsides, including an instance where Jego ran out of writing space during one of his first encounters with Colapinto because of how much information the young driver was able to gather and relay back to his engineer.
“I’ve been pushing him to try to be more concise with his comments. It’s funny, sometimes he gets carried away,” explained Jego.
He attributed this to Colapinto’s background, saying, “I think that’s the Latin philosophy, the way of life. You just express yourself a lot. It’s very different from what you might see in countries like England, where people get straight to the point.”
Becoming the first F1 driver to score points for Argentina in 40+ years
Colapinto’s first F1 Grand Prix came with far less preparation than most rookies are given. While many get the off-season and pre-season testing to get accustomed to the feel and handling of their F1 cars, Colapinto got a trial by fire when he was called on by Williams in the middle of the 2024 season to replace Logan Sargeant, who parted with the team after underperforming throughout the year.
“Unfortunately, Formula 2 is very far away from Formula 1 and Formula 3 as well, so it doesn’t prepare you very well for what a Formula 1 car is,” said Colapinto to Motorsport Week during the 2023 post-season test in Abu Dhabi, where he had his first-ever go in an F1 car.
“[The engineers] tell you more or less how it is and how it feels to drive it and you know how physically demanding it is, but you don’t really understand how much it is until you finally drive it.”
But a few laps during a post-season test and a full Grand Prix are two very different things.
During the Thursday press conference of the 2024 Azerbaijan Grand Prix, shortly after his debut in Monza, Colapinto reflected on advice he got from other drivers before his first race and how it compared to the real thing.
“They told me before driving the Formula 1 car,” he said, “it's very tough on the brakes, it's impressive how much acceleration it has. Then the power, how quick it's in the entry of the corners. And you can imagine it. But until you drive it, you don't really realize. You don't get the feeling of how it is. And it's amazing. It's the same on the races. You have to do it to understand some things.”
But as big as the jump from F2 to F1 may have felt, Colapinto cleared it with ease, taking a mere two races to score his first points with an eighth place finish in Baku. This marked the first time in 42 years that an Argentinian driver scored in an F1 race, the last being Carlos Reutemann, who got P2 during the 1982 South African Grand Prix. Of note, Reutemann was driving for Williams at the time, the very same team that Colapinto would get his first points with.
Translations from Spanish to English provided by Ric Pacheco.
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