Williams Racing announced Tuesday that Formula 2 rookie Franco Colapinto would be joining the Grove-based F1 team for the remainder of the 2024 season with immediate effect, replacing Logan Sargeant. Feeder Series traces the path the Argentinian driver took to get to F1.

By Michael McClure, Martin Lloyd and Gavin Guthrie

Colapinto’s sudden ascension to F1 comes after just 11 total rounds in F2, one at the end of last season and 10 this year. The MP Motorsport driver has taken three podiums in his rookie season, including a win in the Imola sprint race, and sits sixth in the championship thanks to 10 top-six finishes.

Despite his limited F2 experience, the Williams junior has been noted for his consistency in a variety of cars since his single-seater debut in 2018 while delivering standout drives in several series.

Colapinto’s F1 race debut in five days’ time will come at Monza, a circuit where he has taken two F3 victories and triumphed in Formula Renault as well. The 21-year-old will thus vacate his MP seat for this weekend’s F2 round as well as the three that come after it. A replacement at the Dutch team has yet to be announced.

Sargeant, the top rookie in the 2022 F2 season, has faced a challenging season and a half with Williams. Since stepping up to the F1 grid in 2023, he has scored points only at the 2023 United States Grand Prix, his home race. He did qualify in the top 10 on five occasions, with a best result of seventh in Las Vegas last year, but never managed to defeat teammate Alex Albon in qualifying for a grand prix.

The 23-year-old American had several sizable and costly accidents in his time in F1, the latest of which was a fiery accident this past Saturday in free practice three for the Dutch Grand Prix that forced him to miss qualifying.

Rumours began to swirl later that day around his immediate Williams future, with the likes of Mercedes reserve Mick Schumacher and Red Bull and RB reserve Liam Lawson mooted as possible replacements. Williams and team principal James Vowles ultimately decided to promote Colapinto from within the team’s academy ranks. Sargeant will “remain in the Williams family”, per the team’s announcement release.

Colapinto became the first driver to ascend mid-season to a race seat at Williams for non-medical reasons since Kazuki Nakajima replaced Alex Wurz ahead of the 2007 Brazilian Grand Prix after the Austrian’s sudden retirement from F1.

After being announced as a Williams junior in January 2023 ahead of his second F3 season, Colapinto gradually embedded himself within the F1 team over the course of the year. His first F1 experience came at the 2023 post-season test in Abu Dhabi, where he completed 65 laps in the Williams FW45.

Last month, Colapinto participated in free practice 1 for the British Grand Prix, completing 24 laps in the team’s FW46 and finishing the session 18th. He drove Sargeant’s Williams for that session and finished four tenths behind Albon, who will be his teammate for the final nine rounds.

That FP1 appearance also gave Colapinto one crucial Super Licence point to bring his tally to the 40 he needs to be granted an FIA Super Licence for F1 races – a situation akin to Sargeant’s own battle to earn enough Super Licence points for an F1 drive for 2023. The eligibility of his free practice appearance was confirmed to Feeder Series by the FIA on Wednesday morning despite the fact it took place outside of the three calendar years he counted for his remaining Super Licence points.

He had previously earned 17 points in 2020, five for finishing third in the Toyota Racing Series and 12 for finishing third in FRenault Eurocup; five in 2021 for finishing sixth in FRegional Europe; and 15 for finishing fourth in F3 in 2023. On top of those 37 points plus the one he earned from free practice, he also earned two extra points in 2023 for not registering a single penalty point during his F3 campaign.

Despite his eventual promise in single-seaters, Colapinto had a relatively muted karting career, with no international titles or podiums to speak of besides a second-place finish in the South Garda Winter Cup in junior karting in 2017. He and fellow karter María García Puig did, however, win the karting division of the 2018 Summer Youth Olympics, held in Buenos Aires in October.

Colapinto stepped up to single-seaters in late 2018 at Navarra in Spanish F4 and almost immediately made an impact. Racing for the Drivex team – managed at the time by Maria Catarineu, who is on Colapinto’s management team at Bullet Sports Management – he took a win and another podium.

He followed that with a full season in the series in 2019 and dominated the championship, amassing 11 wins, 10 poles and a 98-point lead. He added cameo appearances in Euroformula Open and Formula Renault Eurocup in Drivex-run teams during the year.

He moved up a step on the ladder in 2020, beginning with a winter series campaign in the Toyota Racing Series that saw him finish third with a win and seven further podiums. He also finished third in the final season of Eurocup with two wins, nine total podiums and 213.5 points in his first season of several in junior single-seaters with MP Motorsport. 

Colapinto remained in the series as it merged with the Formula Regional European Championship for the 2021 season and adopted the Tatuus F3-T318 chassis. He took two wins from pole and a further two podiums on his way to sixth in the drivers standings while scoring the majority of MP’s points for the season, all despite missing the first and third rounds of the championship.

Those absences were due to his European Le Mans Series campaign, which was part of an extended foray into endurance racing. Racing for G-Drive Racing, Colapinto and teammates Roman Rusinov and Nyck de Vries – who took the Formula E title later that year – took an overall victory at Paul Ricard and finished fourth in the series. The Argentinian had also come third in the Asian Le Mans Series over the winter while partnered with Rui Andrade and John Falb at G-Drive.

In August, Colapinto also competed in the World Endurance Championship’s 24 Hours of Le Mans with G-Drive and took the LMP2 class lead during the third hour, following a series of wet-weather incidents that plagued his rivals. A high-speed spin ultimately cost the team a frontrunning finish, and Colapinto, Rusinov and De Vries took home seventh in class.

A move up to F3 followed for 2022, albeit with rival Dutch squad Van Amersfoort Racing. In his and the team’s first-ever qualifying session in Bahrain, Colapinto took pole position and brought the car home fifth in the feature race.

His maiden victory in the series came at the sprint race of the next round in Imola, and he added another win in the final round at Monza on top of three further podiums in Spielberg, Hungary and Zandvoort.

He aimed to fight for the title in the 2023 season as he moved back to MP Motorsport, but a challenge never materialised as Trident’s Gabriel Bortoleto ran away with the title. Still, he finished fourth overall, just nine points off second, notching sprint race wins at Silverstone and Monza and three further podiums at the Bahrain, Barcelona and Budapest rounds.

At the end of the year in Abu Dhabi, Colapinto made his F2 debut at MP in place of Jehan Daruvala, who had already signed a contract to race for Maserati in the 2023–24 Formula E season. Colapinto’s move up was part of a package deal that also included a contract for the full 2024 season alongside returning driver Dennis Hauger.

Despite a slow start, Colapinto has impressed in his rookie F2 season and currently sits two places higher than his Norwegian teammate in the drivers’ standings. He secured his maiden sprint race win at Imola after hunting down Paul Aron and passing him on the final lap at Tamburello to secure the victory and the fastest lap.

Since then, he has finished second in consecutive feature races at Barcelona and Austria before taking a pair of top-five finishes at Silverstone. Challenging weekends at Hungary and Spa dropped him to sixth in the standings, 69 points away from championship leader Isack Hadjar.

Colapinto, a fan favourite in his home country who has enjoyed backing from state organisations in Argentina, becomes the first South American driver to race in Formula 1 since Pietro Fittipaldi’s two-round appearance for Haas at the end of 2020. He is the first Argentinian to race in F1 since Gastón Mazzacane, whose last grand prix appearance came at the 2001 San Marino Grand Prix, two years before Colapinto was born.

The Buenos Aires native is also the first F1 graduate to have competed in both F2 and F3 – or any combination of those championships and predecessor series GP2 and GP3 – without taking a feature race victory.

Monza is, incidentally, the venue for Williams’ last driver swap of any sort, which took place when Albon contracted appendicitis on the weekend of the 2022 Italian Grand Prix. Colapinto’s onetime endurance racing teammate De Vries eventually got an F1 call-up and finished ninth for the team, impressing AlphaTauri enough to sign the Dutchman for the 2023 season.

De Vries was then dropped by AlphaTauri partway through the 2023 season after failing to score a point. Before today’s announcement about Sargeant, De Vries was the last F1 driver let go mid-season for performance reasons.

Editor’s note, 28 August 2024, 21:34 CEST: This article has been updated to include the FIA’s direct confirmation of Franco Colapinto’s Super Licence eligibility.

Header photo credit: Dutch Photo Agency