How an impossible F1 2025 job really started

Those who didn’t follow Jack Doohan’s Australian Grand Prix weekend closely might assume he’s taken a step closer to the Alpine exit door by crashing out on lap one.

They might also roll their eyes at Doohan’s claim after the race that “there are a lot of positives this weekend and they outweigh this negative”, but if anything he improved his prospects with his Melbourne performance.

That’s because the 22-year-old showed eye-catching pace in dry conditions on Friday and Saturday. A superficial glance at the timing sheets showed Doohan was eliminated in Q2 after lapping three-quarters-of-a-second off team-mate Pierre Gasly, who scraped into Q3 in 10th place, but there’s more to it than that.

In Q1, Doohan and Gasly were evenly matched and separated by just 0.013s. In the second segment of qualifying, Doohan’s first run was untidy, with a wide moment at Turn 12 leading to the deletion of his laptime.

His second run was better and he was close to Gasly’s pace, around three-hundredths slower, at the point when he began to drop back on the run to Turn 12 thanks to the yellow flag caused by Lewis Hamilton’s spin. This cost him the use of the DRS, with traffic in the final sector also sapping time and effectively ruining the lap.

Had he completed the lap unhindered, he would likely have been challenging for a Q3 place, with the 0.751s deficit to his team-mate entirely unrepresentative.

“The pace was strong,” said Doohan. “We were split on aero for most of the weekend and we were still quite OK in FP1 to FP3, shaping up next to Pierre. We went for the high downforce yesterday afternoon, which I felt much more comfortable on and we were quite strong.

"If we could have completed that Q2 lap we would have been comfortably into Q3 on a high 1m15s and that already would have put us in quite a good place. Ifs, buts and maybes, but it's good confidence to know going into the rest of the season.”

Gasly described the Melbourne weekend as “harder than we thought”, and also struggled with brake issues on Friday. Combined with Alpine’s struggle to unlock the car’s performance, this might have meant that Gasly wasn’t at his best.

We therefore can’t draw definitive conclusions from Melbourne beyond the fact that, speed-wise, it was exactly the start Doohan needed - even if the race itself went disastrously wrong.

“I think maybe a combination of a white line and it seems that we had a spike in rpm when I upshifted to fourth,” was Doohan’s explanation of his opening-lap crash in the wet. “Maybe a little bit less right foot, a little more left and it won't happen again.”

That rookie error is forgivable provided it isn’t repeated, especially on a day when vastly experienced drivers like Carlos Sainz and Fernando Alonso were also caught out. Rightly, team principal Oliver Oakes focused on the pace Doohan showed rather than dwelling too much on the accident.

“He would have been very close to Pierre, or slightly ahead,” said Oakes of Doohan’s qualifying performance.

“The main thing from my side is that he’s had a lot slung at him the past few weeks. To come to this race, there’s a lot of fan support for him to deal with, and throughout qualifying he just did a really good job, which is great to see and [good] for his own confidence as well going into this next run of races.”

What has been “slung” at Doohan are the inevitable questions about reserve driver Franco Colapinto’s presence. Much as the team would like to portray it as baseless rumour, the notion Doohan could be replaced by the Argentinian during the season didn’t emerge from nowhere.

When his signing was announced, Williams team principal James Vowles referenced the deal “represents Franco’s best chance of securing a race seat in 2025 or ‘26”, while it’s only logical for Alpine to be open to shuffling its line-up given Colapinto’s impressive showings for Williams last year and the financial backing he brings.  Oakes accepts this “noise” adds to the pressure on Doohan, and accepted some team responsibility for it too.

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“It’s fair to say we’ve caused a lot of the noise, being open,” said Oakes of the pressure on Doohan. “We haven’t put him in the best position there. But flip it the other way, we’ve got a duty as a team to perform, we’ve got 900 people who depend on us to make the right choice for the team.

“Probably, if it had been anyone else who was signed as a reserve driver without a big following and all of the noise that comes with that, it would have been slightly different.

"But it was probably quite a quiet winter, other than Lewis's move, everyone was looking for something to write about. But hopefully now [this will] give it a couple more races to just settle down a bit.”

If Doohan continues to show strong pace relative to Gasly, and can translate that into race results, then there will be no performance justification for Alpine even to consider a change.

Doohan has set out his stall to give Alpine no reason for a switch, relying on doing his talking with sheer, unignorable performance on track.

“The strong thing is that we have pace and I was quick behind the wheel,” said Doohan. “It would be unfortunate if I didn’t have that and I still crashed. At least we have that pace, that’s important.

"And I know that if we put it all together, we can have a great rest of the season.”