{"id":29615,"date":"2025-05-09T19:54:02","date_gmt":"2025-05-09T19:54:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kede.com.br\/sport\/alpine-franco-colapinto-replaces-jack-doohan\/"},"modified":"2025-05-09T19:54:03","modified_gmt":"2025-05-09T19:54:03","slug":"alpine-franco-colapinto-replaces-jack-doohan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kede.com.br\/sport\/alpine-franco-colapinto-replaces-jack-doohan\/","title":{"rendered":"Alpine: Franco Colapinto replaces Jack Doohan"},"content":{"rendered":"


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This is the latest upheaval at a team that have become notorious for it in recent years.<\/p>\n

The Colapinto decision is easy to explain – he brings money from Latin American sponsors, which Briatore wants to access. Doohan always looked like a driver on borrowed time as a result. And unless Colapinto is embarrassing in the next five races, he will be expected to stay on longer.<\/p>\n

The difficulties at Alpine are a much wider issue.<\/p>\n

Renault has twice set five-year targets to become competitive since it returned to F1 as a works effort in 2016, but Alpine have made little progress – in fact, they have gone backwards in the past couple of years.<\/p>\n

Briatore was brought in by Renault chief executive officer Luca de Meo last summer to arrest this slide.<\/p>\n

He appointed Oakes as team principal, the latest in a series of changes<\/a> at the top of Alpine in recent years. But everyone in F1 knew the Briton was not only nothing like Briatore’s first choice for the role, but also only a figurehead. The real power lay with Briatore.<\/p>\n

Briatore was a controversial appointment – he had not had an active role in F1 since he was banned from the sport for fixing the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix in the notorious ‘crashgate’<\/a> saga.<\/p>\n

This was when Renault driver Nelson Piquet deliberately crashed in the inaugural Singapore race to boost the chances of his team-mate Fernando Alonso.<\/p>\n

There were suspicions at the time, but the story became public after Piquet was sacked by Briatore midway through 2009 and his father, the three-time champion of the same name, spoke out.<\/p>\n

Briatore and technical director Pat Symonds were both banned from F1, although Briatore succeeded in having his ban overturned by a French court.<\/p>\n

Symonds has been rehabilitated and has since had roles with Williams and F1 itself and is now working for the nascent Cadillac team, which makes its debut next year.<\/p>\n

Briatore has been charged by De Meo with making Alpine work again – he was in charge of the team when they won titles as Benetton in 1994-95 and Renault in 2005-06.<\/p>\n

Since Briatore took charge, Renault has decided to end its long-running F1 engine programme, which has been in the sport almost continuously since 1977.<\/p>\n

There were strikes at the engine base at Viry-Chatillon near Paris last year as a result, but the decision went ahead, and Alpine will use Mercedes customer engines next year.<\/p>\n

The team went through something of a revival last year after Briatore took charge, climbing to sixth in the constructors’ championship by the end of the year after being close to the bottom.<\/p>\n

But this year has not started well. Alpine are ninth of 10 teams in the standings after six races, with only seven points.<\/p>\n

The car is on average the seventh fastest, and Briatore’s patience with executive technical director David Sanchez, who joined the team last May, also appears to be wearing thin.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is the latest upheaval at a team that have become notorious for it in recent years. The Colapinto decision is easy to explain – he brings money from Latin American sponsors, which Briatore wants to access. Doohan always looked like a driver on borrowed time as a result. And unless Colapinto is embarrassing in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":29616,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kede.com.br\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29615"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kede.com.br\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kede.com.br\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kede.com.br\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kede.com.br\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29615"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/kede.com.br\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29615\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29617,"href":"https:\/\/kede.com.br\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29615\/revisions\/29617"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kede.com.br\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kede.com.br\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kede.com.br\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kede.com.br\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}