Franco Colapinto will start 13th in the F1 Barcelona race after edging Alpine teammate Pierre Gasly in qualifying, but the Argentine still missed the top 10 and admitted the car was uncomfortable to drive. He set a lap of 1:16.191, 0.070 seconds quicker than Gasly, and fell 0.423 seconds short of the Q3 cut.
The result matters now because Sunday’s Grand Prix of Barcelona starts at 10:00 and runs 56 laps, leaving Colapinto with one last chance to turn a mid-grid spot into something bigger. George Russell took pole with 1:14.679, Lewis Hamilton was second for Ferrari 0.064 seconds back, and Andrea Kimi Antonelli qualified third after a session that was interrupted when Charles Leclerc crashed at Turn 4 and triggered a red flag.
Colapinto, 23, was one of the last Alpine drivers to complete his lap in a session where the team had already battled problems in practice, even though both cars still reached Q2 comfortably. That made his 13th-place run a small recovery, but not a clean one: he was ahead of Gasly and still outside the points-paying positions, close enough to Q3 to see the gap, not close enough to erase it.
What he described afterward matched the lap time. Colapinto said starting 13th gives him opportunities and that the team is not far from the points, but he also said he hoped for less tire degradation in the race because they had run out of grip in a single lap and the car had felt difficult to manage. That leaves Alpine with a straightforward task on Sunday and a harder one beneath it: making a car that felt awkward over one lap last long enough to matter over 56.
