Why do young F1 drivers like Doohan have so little time to impress?

Gamers of a certain vintage will recall Cannon Fodder, the 1990s tactical shoot ’em up (as the genre was then known) wherein you guided a squad of soldiers through a series of dangerous and fast-paced missions. Your pool of soldiers was limited, but nevertheless expendable to a degree.

There appear to be some parallels in Formula 1 this season: just a handful of races after Liam Lawson was kicked out of Red Bull with just two grands prix aboard an RB21 in the tank, Jack Doohan has been returned to the subs bench at Alpine.

F1 has always been a sink-or-swim game unless a driver brings enough financial backing to offset any underperformance. Even then, teams with ambition will still gravitate towards speed when they can, as when Williams parted company with Nicholas Latifi and then Logan Sargeant.

History provides ample case studies of drivers who appear more than averagely talented, only to flounder when they get their shot at the big time. Stephen South, to pluck out one example, impressed enough in 1978 running his own F2 car with his father and one mechanic that future McLaren boss Ron Dennis recruited South for his Project Four F2 team the following season, where he also showed well.

F1 tests for Lotus and McLaren followed and South was given the nod to stand in for an injured Alain Prost in the 1980 US GP at Long Beach. The M29C, described by soon-to-be-ex-team boss Teddy Mayer as “ghastly”, was among the worst cars McLaren ever fielded; South failed to qualify and, even though team-mate John Watson could do no better than 21st on the grid, South wasn’t invited back. Later in the year he suffered a career-ending injury in a Can-Am accident.

Many other drivers have travelled this route, though the majority of that group have contested more than one race. Not being quick or wealthy enough has usually been the cause, though there are outliers such as Irish maverick Tommy Byrne (five appearances, two starts for Theodore in 1982), whose somewhat distinctive character led to the more serious-minded heads in the F1 paddock passing him over.

Often these drivers have arrived at a difficult, politically tense inflection point in a team’s existence – South, for instance, in that period when title sponsor Marlboro was tiring of McLaren’s dismal performance and in the process of engineering a shotgun marriage with Project Four. Even Prost, then a rookie, became a political football.

There are parallels here with the situation at Alpine, which has been almost permanently in reboot mode since Renault re-acquired the team at the end of 2016. The most recent managementquake yielded the return of former team principal Flavio Briatore to the nest as ‘executive advisor’ to Renault Group CEO Luca de Meo, with Oliver Oakes acting as team principal (though his sudden departure this week suggests his authority was more limited than he expected).

Briatore, you’ll recall, was at the heart of the shenanigans which resulted in Michael Schumacher joining Benetton after one race for Jordan in 1991. There was also the matter of the egregious race-fixing scam in Singapore in 2008.

Flav isn’t a man shy of moving fast and breaking things, as evidenced by him executively advising De Meo that Renault’s power units aren’t fit for purpose and a Mercedes engine deal would be better. See also the extension of the young-driver roster; now Alpine practically has a ‘test and development driver’ for every day of the week and one for Sunday best.

Flavio Briatore, Executive Advisor of Alpine F1

Photo by: Sam Bagnall / Motorsport Images

The executive knives have been out for Doohan since Alpine added Franco Colapinto to its Cannon Fodder-style portfolio back in January. And the pressure to drop him has only intensified since then.

To an extent, the noisy caterwaul from Latin America would have followed that escalating trajectory anyway, even if Doohan’s progress through the first six rounds of 2025 hadn’t been so haphazard. Recently Alpine had to restrict comments on its social media feeds, so toxic has been the invective aimed at Doohan from the southern hemisphere.

In the sporting world as well as the political and corporate world – and indeed monarchs’ courts in feudal Europe – it’s an inevitable consequence of regime change that high-profile individuals closely associated with (or recruited by) the previous regime are next to face the axe (literally, in the case of feudal Europe). Doohan was therefore on a slightly sticky wicket even when he was announced as a 2025 Alpine race driver last August, for he had been on the Alpine Academy books since 2022.

Well-informed rumours had been swirling, since Alpine dropped Esteban Ocon for the final round last season and put Doohan in, that Jack’s race contract only guaranteed a certain number of races.

While the axe has taken longer to swing for Doohan than it did for Lawson at Red Bull, the reasons are understood to be broadly similar. Whenever a team loses faith in a driver there is generally a tipping point after which the driver’s position becomes untenable.

Two rounds were all it took for Red Bull to decide Lawson wasn’t going to get to grips with the RB21 and it needed to roll the dice again. In this at least it has form, for the Red Bull young-driver programme has always been an up-or-out business – and although drivers usually get three years rather than two weekends, Lawson is still part of the picture for now.

Autosport understands that the tipping point for Doohan came in Japan, after he left the DRS flap open into Turn 1 during practice and his car picked up substantial damage. Alpine was quick to flag the incident up as driver error and Doohan felt he had been thrown under the bus, since he had been going into Turn 1 with the DRS open in the simulator without these consequences, and nobody had warned him not to do it on a real track.

Jack Doohan, Alpine crash

Photo by: Bryn Lennon – Formula 1

You may conclude there are parallels here with those nincompoops who sued a well-known fast-food chain after being scalded by coffee they hadn’t been warned was hot. But in Doohan’s defence there was clearly a disparity between outcomes in the virtual and real worlds.

Since then he has been palpably less assured when dealing with the regular questions about his future, and has even been temperamental behind closed doors – as demonstrated by the disgruntled timbre of his radio communications after the pitlane snafu which contributed to him being eliminated early in qualifying for the Miami sprint. It’s understood that, after this, far from receiving an arm around the shoulder from senior management he was given a verbal dressing-down for venting his frustrations publicly.

Doohan still had his supporters at Alpine – unlike, say, mid-1990s Tyrrell pay driver Riccardo Rosset, whose mechanics were said to have transposed the ‘r’ and the ‘t’ of his surname on his paddock scooter so it read ‘tosser’. But Doohan wasn’t delivering enough in terms of on-track returns to support their case.

The figure heading the other way through the revolving door, Colapinto, has done enough in nine grands prix for Williams to amply demonstrate that he is not slow, and therefore a relatively low-risk replacement for Doohan. While there was a feeling last summer that Williams was taking something of a flyer on him when it dropped Logan Sargeant mid-season, he is now more of a known quantity – even if his speed sometimes took him into the wall.

More tantalising still for Briatore is the potential to unlock sponsorship deals in South America, where Colapinto’s profile is huge. Enshrining his promotion as a five-race “assessment” is a typically brazen Flavio move, giving himself a get-out clause should either Colapinto’s performance or the bags of LatAm cash not match expectations (or, indeed, both).

Franco Colapinto, Williams Racing

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

You may think meting out this sort of treatment isn’t the way to get the best out of young drivers. Oakes clearly took that view.

If we were to express the reasons for young drivers getting so little time to make an impression in terms of a Venn diagram, commerce would undoubtedly be one of the sets. F1 is more global than ever before thanks to America finally getting onboard, teams are now enshrined as franchises heading towards billion-dollar values, but no less cash-hungry for that. As a consequence, driver image is a key pillar of commercial success and one seen as a loser brand has negative effects on that value.

Another factor is the sheer difficulty of the current generation of ground-effect cars, all the more so as this ruleset reaches maturity and the machines have become edgier as they reach their limits. To some extent you can either drive them or you can’t – even Lewis Hamilton has had his problems.

With cost controls, opportunities to test have grown fewer and young drivers get less seat time than they did in previous decades. The rookie test provisions and ‘Testing of Previous Cars’ protocols only partially offset this.

Another major set in our Venn diagram is an old truism of motor racing: perception is all in Formula 1. Oliver Bearman, another rookie who has had an up-and-down 2025 season so far, with particular reference to qualifying, hasn’t been subjected to anywhere near the level of threat Doohan or Lawson encountered.

Oliver Bearman, Haas F1 Team

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

This is partially a factor of environment, since Ayao Komatsu runs a ship that’s happy as well as professional. But also one of perception: Bearman’s debut as a substitute for Carlos Sainz at Ferrari in Saudi Arabia last year was stellar, and the power of its afterglow ensured that two somewhat less spectacular outings for Haas later in the year, including a messy affair in Sao Paulo, have been all but struck from the record.

If you were to eliminate Jeddah from the sample set, the optics would be less positive.

There are always plenty more drivers coming through the junior ladder, and the teams are scrambling to sign them up younger than ever – Alpine, Red Bull and McLaren have karters on their books. It’s a game in which a degree of expendability is tolerated, provided there is a funnel of personnel ready to take to the field of combat.

A lot like Cannon Fodder, in fact.