In the past five weeks, MP Motorsport F2 driver Franco Colapinto has stood on two feature race podiums, taken three further top-five finishes and participated in his first career F1 practice session at Silverstone. Feeder Series spoke exclusively to the Williams junior to get the lowdown on his whirlwind summer and continued growth so far.

By Jim Kimberley

The 2024 British Grand Prix weekend was one to remember for fans who had seen seven-time F1 champion Lewis Hamilton return to winning ways, while in the junior ranks, F3 had one of its all-time great races. Yet between these moments of excitement was the grand prix weekend debut for F2 race winner Colapinto, who drove the Williams FW46 in the first free practice session on Friday.

In doing so, he became the first Argentinian to drive in an F1 weekend session since Gaston Mazzacane drove his final race in 2001, two years before Colapinto was born.

The Williams junior has been in the ascendancy since the strong second half of his 2023 F3 campaign. During that period, he netted two sprint race victories and eight points finishes on his way to fourth in the standings.

Now a rookie in F2, Colapinto continues to occupy the upper positions in most sessions with his MP Motorsport car, taking top-five finishes in eight of the past 12 races. Entering this weekend’s round at Spa, he sits fifth in the standings with 96 points, 44 behind series leader Isack Hadjar.

“It’s going well,” Colapinto said about the season so far. “I think it’s as expected.

“At the beginning of the year, we struggled quite a lot, and maybe the expectations went down a bit and I tried to start from zero again.

“It’s not surprising at all, the performance we are having now. I think it’s what we should have had since the beginning of the year.

“For one reason or another, we didn’t quite have the pace in the first two or three rounds. But now we are consistently up there. It’s what we worked for with the team, and the results are showing.”

Speaking earlier in the year, Colapinto had admitted he wasn’t used to being behind a teammate in equal machinery. Dennis Hauger, the driver opposite him at MP Motorsport, is an F3 champion and is familiar with the Dutch F2 outfit having raced with them last year.

Colapinto trailed Hauger 41–13 after the first three rounds before taking a breakthrough sprint race win at round four in Imola. He now leads the Norweigan driver by 17 points, and Feeder Series asked the Williams junior if that upturn in performance was thanks to his growth with the Dallara F2 2024 chassis.

“Yeah, it is,” he answered. “I’m looking very strong now, in the race especially. My pace had been looking really good in the last few rounds.

“In qualifying, I’m still working on it. I’m struggling with some little things that are hurting me a bit in qualifying, but I’m getting there.

“Silverstone was a really good quali. I felt like [by] doing F1, of course, I damaged a little bit my performance in qualifying.

“Even then, I qualified in a pretty good spot [fourth], very close to P2 and not far off P1. I think it was quite easy, just putting a little bit of a better lap together to be second.

“I think I maximised almost everything, but it did feel like driving the F1 car took a bit of the feeling with the F2 car, and I had to readapt quickly.”

In both the Spielberg and Silverstone feature races, Colapinto used the alternate tyre strategy and found clear air while out front on the harder compound of tyre. Though this streategy has worked well for the 21-year-old, he admitted its use was a byproduct of having a similar performance level to Hauger.

“The issue is that when you’re so close with your teammates, the team doesn’t want to have two cars on similar strategies,” he said. “Double stacking in a race is not really possible in F2 because the pit stops are longer and there’s only one mechanic per tyre.

“The decision was basically because I was starting P4 and my teammate P3. I think this weekend [in Silverstone] was not the best for strategy. The second car on that strategy finished quite far back as well, but I just had really good pace on the hards. And that put me back in the fight again,” he continued. Hauger finished the race ninth.

“The rain at the end of the race made our life very difficult. We struggled for tyre temperature on the hards. They were not ready, and they didn’t have a lot of grip.

“With so many safety cars, we had to go through the same issue again and again in every restart. The people on softs could just put the tyres up to temperature easily and looked much faster.

“My mirror was also broken, so I couldn’t see behind. When you’re trying to defend, and the others are much quicker, you need to look back to know where they are and try not to crash.

“The biggest issue for our race was that the others didn’t go through a phase of degradation on the softs. They could push straight away after the safety car came in. That hurt my race quite a bit because we couldn’t push.

“I had a lot of degradation in the last three laps, and I lost eight seconds, but the others didn’t have that. I think that would have put me in a podium place if those safety cars hadn’t come in. It is what it is.

“It was a risky strategy, and luckily, we still made it work to finish P4. It was still good points and the fastest lap, so it was okay. But with the pace we had, we showed that we would have been there in the fight for the win.”

Colapinto finished fifth in the Hungaroring sprint race after several drivers ahead of him had to pit for new tyres. In the feature race, in which both he and Hauger used the traditional option-prime strategy, he fell from sixth to 13th in the closing laps as drivers on the alternate strategy with fresher tyres got past.

Header photo credit: XPB / Williams Racing