Flavio Briatore avoids giving Jack Doohan a guarantee for the full 2025 Formula 1 season – Is the Australian now driving on probation?
Although Alpine has officially confirmed Jack Doohan for the 2025 Formula 1 season, many experts in the paddock doubt that the rookie will actually be in the car until the season finale in Abu Dhabi. And Flavio Briatore is not currently doing much to dispel such rumors.
For some time now, there has been speculation that Doohan is only certain to be in the driving seat for the first races of the new year. If he does not deliver good results in these, it is said, he could be replaced by Franco Colapinto.
These rumors gained even more traction last week, when Alpine officially signed the former Williams driver as its reserve driver for the 2025 season. A swap in the cockpit could thus be arranged quickly.
Now, Briatore could simply brush such rumors aside by publicly backing Doohan. But that is exactly what the Italian recently explicitly avoided doing in an interview with the Parisian daily newspaper Le Parisien.
Briatore: “You can’t be emotional in Formula 1”
“The only thing that’s certain is death,” he answers with a laugh when asked whether it is really certain that Doohan and Pierre Gasly will be in the car at the 2025 season opener? ‘We will start the year with Pierre and Jack, I can guarantee that,’ says Briatore.
“Everything else we will see during the season,” he adds, thus avoiding giving Doohan a guarantee in particular. ‘I have to get the team in the right shape to achieve good results,’ Briatore explains.
“The driver is the one who has to finish the work of almost 1,000 people behind him. Everyone [in the factory] works for just two people. If there is a driver who is not making progress, who is not getting me results, then I will change him,” said Briatore.
“In Formula 1, you can’t be emotional,” explains the man, who only returned to Alpine as a consultant in 2024 and has a reputation in the paddock from his earlier career for making short work of drivers who don’t perform as he wants them to.
Doohan’s debut did not convince experts
“He is tough enough to see it through,” said expert Marc Surer, for example, in an exclusive video interview on the Formel1.de YouTube channel back in December, when the question was whether Briatore could axe Doohan again after just a few races?
Incidentally, the fact that the interview was conducted before Alpine officially announced the Colapinto signing is also important in Briatore’s latest statements. So the pressure on rookie Doohan has increased, if at all, since then.
Doohan’s early Formula 1 debut at the 2024 season finale in Abu Dhabi probably didn’t exactly help the Australian, who finished an unspectacular 15th. “He should have done better,” Helmut Marko, for example, told F1-Insider.
If Briatore’s opinion also prevails in the first races of 2025, the Australian’s Formula 1 career could be over before it has even begun.