For the third consecutive qualifying head-to-head, Franco Colapinto has out-paced Pierre Gasly at Alpine — and the margins are no longer the rounding-error variety. The Argentine reached Q3 in Canada by three hundredths of a second while Gasly was eliminated in Q2 for the second weekend running, capping a stretch the team would have struggled to predict back in March, when many in the paddock were openly wondering whether Colapinto was the right driver for the seat at all.
Hosts of the P1 with Matt & Tommy podcast highlighted the size of the gaps in their post-qualifying reaction. "Q1 he was two and a half tenths quicker than Gasly, and Q2 he was three tenths clear of Gasly," Matt Gallagher said. "So these are big margins. Franco can be very happy with his performances so far."
The turnaround is striking because Alpine's narrative for the first quarter of 2026 was the inverse of this. Gasly was the steady scorer, frequently spoken of as the best of the rest behind the top four teams, while Colapinto's start to the year prompted external questions about his future. Co-host Tommy Bellingham acknowledged the shift with a degree of surprise: "He had a tough start to the year, and I think a lot of people questioning was he any good, is it time for Alpine to look for the next driver. And he's really stepped up."
That step up has not gone unnoticed within the team. Colapinto out-qualified Gasly in both Miami sessions before repeating the trick in Canada, and the margins are now consistent rather than circumstantial. "I'm not going to say Colapinto easily made it to Q3 — he got there by three hundredths of a second," Gallagher cautioned. "But Franco is clearly on a small but excellent run of form. Miami, and now here. It has to be said that Colapinto has clearly found something."
Gasly's side of the equation is harder to read. The Frenchman had been one of the early stars of the 2026 season, often racing Max Verstappen for the best-of-the-rest points before the upper midfield began to converge. His most recent two weekends have produced one Q1 exit and one Q2 exit, with the team unable to explain the sudden gap to a teammate Gasly was comfortably ahead of as recently as March. Bellingham was reluctant to write off the season: "I'm not going to write off his season just because he's had a poor weekend. But surprising to see that Gasly seems to be struggling at the moment."
What appears to have changed underneath both drivers is the Alpine itself. The team's late-arriving Miami upgrade package, which carried Colapinto to a career-best P7 finish in Florida, looks to have shifted the car balance into a window the Argentine prefers. Gallagher captured the broader picture: "If the Alpine is potentially the fifth fastest car, it's not this weekend. Racing Bulls absolutely is, maybe even fourth fastest." Yet for Colapinto, that has not been a barrier — he still extracted a Q3 berth from a car that, by his own teammate's evidence, no longer comfortably belongs there. The question heading into Sunday's wet-window forecast is whether Gasly can rediscover the version of himself that, only six weeks ago, looked the safer Alpine bet.
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*Originally published on [News Formula](https://newsformula.one/article/colapinto-gasly-quali-sweep-canada-alpine-2026). Visit for full coverage.*
