Franco Colapinto has done something refreshingly rare in Formula 1: he has looked inward. Rather than simply blaming faceless keyboard warriors for the sport’s online abuse crisis, the Alpine driver has pointed the finger squarely at his fellow competitors too. And he has a specific example to back it up.
The Bearman Business
After Oliver Bearman‘s heavy crash in Japan, the Haas driver chose a podcast to publicly attribute blame to Colapinto. The Argentine’s response is telling. He told Motorsport.com that he had already reached out privately and received nothing back.
“I sent him a message straight after the race and he never answered. We never spoke about it afterwards, but then he said this about me. It’s those kinds of things that we can fix in a different way, in a way that would be much easier and by not going public.” – Franco Colapinto
Going on a podcast to air a grievance you ignored in private is not exactly a masterclass in conflict resolution. Colapinto is right to call it out.
Society’s Mirror, Apparently
Colapinto is not letting fans entirely off the hook either. He frames the torrent of abuse as a broader societal rot, not merely an F1 problem. Drivers are deleting their social media accounts at an alarming rate, and he believes the sport needs to speak louder about why.
“As drivers, we need to help people understand how much their words can affect others. They probably think that we never read them anyway. But we’ve arrived at the situation that most athletes are deleting their social media.” – Franco Colapinto
The FIA’s United Against Online Abuse initiative and its AI filtering tools are noble efforts, but Colapinto’s point is sharper: the paddock itself sometimes pours petrol on the flames it then complains about.
The Ten Percent Reality
Beyond the abuse debate, Colapinto offers a surprisingly candid take on just how little of an F1 driver’s life actually involves driving. His comments about the mental load of race weekends are worth reading alongside our piece on how the off-track environment shapes a driver’s development.
“Maybe you drive only 10% of the time as an F1 driver, but it’s shocking how mentally demanding an F1 weekend is.” – Franco Colapinto
He says 2026 has been the year he learned to manage his energy properly, arriving at race weekends focused rather than already drained. For a driver whose future beyond this season remains uncertain, that kind of growth matters.
The Verdict
Colapinto deserves credit for not playing the simple victim card. Online abuse in F1 is real, ugly, and worsening. But his willingness to acknowledge that drivers amplify the problem with careless public remarks is the kind of self-awareness this paddock rarely produces. Whether his colleagues are listening is, of course, another matter entirely.
