What Franco Colapinto has done at Williams that shows he’s already inside Alex Albon’s head

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Alex Albon was comfortable at Williams before Franco Colapinto arrived. Over the course of 18 months, he beat Logan Sargeant in every single Grand Prix qualifying session.

Albon was indisputably the lead driver for the team, so much so that James Vowles let him race in Sargeant’s car when he broke his own chassis at the Australian GP in March. He would score 31 of the team’s 32 points during their partnership.

He’d also been dominant up against Nicholas Latifi in 2022 immediately after his arrival. He won the Sunday battle 15-4 and the qualifying head-to-head 19-2.

But Colapinto, who replaced Sargeant at the Italian GP and will race for the team until the end of the season, has presented an instant challenge. He outqualified Albon in just his second race in Azerbaijan, though the Thai driver wasn’t able to complete a second run in Q3 after a mishap by his mechanics.

Still, there was nothing artificial about the deficit in Singapore, where the 21-year-old was just seven-thousandths of a second adrift. He was also running ahead of Albon on merit in the race before the ex-Red Bull man retired.

He very nearly scored another point to add to the four he collected in Baku. Having kept Sergio Perez behind for more than 30 laps, he just lost out.

Alex Albon’s comments about Williams teammate Franco Colapinto ‘made no sense’

Speaking to Motorsport.com, Colapinto’s former boss Sander Dorsman raved about his ‘fantastic’ move at the start of the Singapore GP. Dorsman runs the MP Motorsport team who worked with Colapinto in FRECA, Formula 3 and Formula 2.

The Argentine abruptly left F2 midway through the season after Williams, who’d signed him to their driver academy, called them up. He was sixth in the championship in that time.

Colapinto overtook three cars in one go after the lights went out in Marina Bay, bravely diving down the inside but slowing his car down enough to make the apex. An angry Albon, one of the victims, called it a ‘divebomb’ over the radio and asked what he was doing.

But Dorsman feels that these remarks ‘made no sense’. Far from legitimate criticism, they instead show that the team’s new arrival is ‘in his head’.

“I especially thought that action at the start was fantastic of course,” he said. “That is exactly how we know Franco, he goes all out.

“He simply does not care about reputations and what really struck me there was that Albon immediately came on the radio. Something that actually made no sense at all, but it does show that it seems that Franco was already a bit in his head. So that is interesting.”

Why confused Franco Colapinto ‘couldn’t even go straight’ on his debut

Otmar Szafnauer was concerned about Williams after they axed Sargeant. He felt the replacement was going to take up to five races to acclimatise, leaving them with little time to score points.

But the former Alpine boss admits he was ‘wrong’ after Colapinto’s remarkable start. His old team fell to ninth in the championship when the new Williams duo combined for 10 transformative points in Azerbaijan.

Szafnauer’s concerns weren’t entirely misplaced, though. Colapinto struggled with the steering wheel on his F1 debut, so much so that he ‘couldn’t even go straight’.

That underlines his lack of experience, but he’s taken on information at a rapid rate. It’s not inconceivable that he could be beating Albon by the end of the season, which would give Vowles a long-term dilemma.