Montoya defends Colapinto: ‘I admire people who try’

Former F1 driver Juan Pablo Montoya has offered Franco Colapinto a measure of redemption after the Argentine’s costly clash in Baku, acknowledging the Alpine driver got it badly wrong while refusing to condemn the aggression that led to his mistake.

Colapinto’s Azerbaijan Grand Prix unravelled immediately after the final Safety Car restart.

Running deep in the pack approaching Turn 1, the Alpine driver locked up under braking and ploughed into teammate Pierre Gasly. McLaren’s Lando Norris was then caught up in the chain reaction, leaving all three drivers with race-ending damage.

Colapinto did not try to hide from his error afterwards, admitting he had been “completely out of control”.

But while the incident earned the Argentine plenty of criticism, Montoya saw something else in the attempted move: a driver willing to seize an opportunity rather than simply protect what he already had.

Montoya sees the thinking behind the mistake

The former Williams and McLaren driver suggested Colapinto had been caught in a familiar restart trap, with the concertina effect through the field making it difficult to judge where the traffic would ultimately compress.

"I think he expected everybody to go pretty deep. The problem is when you're so far back it's like a traffic jam," the Colombian told F1 TV during its post-race coverage.

"Everybody backs off and backs off. And you see he brakes and he's going to run over somebody.

"So he gets out of the way and gets to the inside, and he nearly stopped the car. He made a mistake and ran over the team-mate and he took Lando out as well. He made a mistake, but it was close."

That final assessment perhaps best captured Montoya’s view of the incident. There was no attempt to excuse Colapinto’s execution, but equally no suggestion that the Argentine should be discouraged from taking risks altogether.

‘Franco is the guy who wants to go’

For Montoya, that willingness to attack is precisely what separates drivers who actively hunt for opportunities from those simply trying to preserve their position.

He pointed to Max Verstappen as the obvious example of how such an approach can produce both spectacular rewards and occasional mistakes.

"The hard thing there is you're aggressive; you see an opportunity, and I admire people that try,” he said.

“When you have a restart, they see it as an opportunity. Some people see the restart as, 'I don't want to lose a position,' and Franco is the guy who wants to go and take it.

"When you're always the guy, like Max Verstappen, who always sees an opportunity to take it, you're going to make mistakes."

For Colapinto, however, the Baku error came at a particularly painful moment.

The Argentine has scored 27 points this season, while Gasly sits 10th in the Drivers’ standings on 41, making the loss of both Alpine cars particularly costly in a race where points were there to be collected.

Montoya’s message was therefore not that Colapinto’s aggression should go unchecked. Rather, it was that the instinct to attack is not necessarily something a driver should lose because one attempt ends in spectacular failure.

Read also: Norris apologises to Colapinto after calling for race ban

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