Racing Bulls seize 32-point P5 lead over Alpine as Gasly and Colapinto plot fightback

Racing Bulls' triple-header surge opens commanding gap

The battle between Racing Bulls and Alpine for fifth place in the 2026 World Championship has been one of the season's defining subplots — and at the moment it is firmly advantage to the Italian team. A strong run through the Azerbaijan, Bahrain and Singapore triple header saw Racing Bulls log 23 points, while Alpine scored none, leaving the former with a 32-point cushion with six rounds to go, including this weekend's United States Grand Prix at COTA.

That lead has grown steadily through the autumn. Prior reporting from 2026-09-10 had the two sides separated by just 13 points, with Alpine on 62 to Racing Bulls' 75. After the Azerbaijan Grand Prix on 2026-09-26, the gap had stretched to 15 points following the collision between Alpine's Franco Colapinto and Pierre Gasly that ended both drivers' races while Racing Bulls' Arvid Lindblad finished seventh. The subsequent rounds in Bahrain and Singapore then extended the buffer to the current 32.

'We need to win this one' — Colapinto calls for reset

Alpine's challenge is to bounce back from a difficult run and score consistently over the remaining races. Colapinto is clear-eyed about the task ahead.

"It's clear that we lost the last triple header, and we need to win this one," the Argentine said. "We need a kind of stop, a reset, and a start from zero again. And it's tricky in F1 when everything comes very fast, and you have one weekend to another to another, and then you are in the sim.

"We were a long time in the factory four days after the race in Singapore, trying to find some performance for the future and trying to understand the issues we've got.

"I think in general again it's not to overanalyse anything, we don't need to go super into detail of every little bit, but generally it's been a couple of tough weekends. We mostly understand why. We also were not the luckiest, but you can clearly see it. So again, we'll need a bit of luck this last part of the year, but I'm sure we can do a good end of the season."

Qualifying pace, race-day pain

The big frustration for the Enstone team is that the A526 has been competitive at every track, and often faster in Qualifying than the VCARB 03 — yet that speed has not been converted into points. The most infamous example came in Azerbaijan, where Colapinto and Gasly collided. In contrast, Racing Bulls have generally capitalised on their opportunities, notwithstanding the contact between Arvid Lindblad and Liam Lawson at the same event.

"There's been quite a few races we haven't really been as quick as them, but we've outscored them," Lawson said. "Baku we got lucky, the team got lucky. And I feel like that outside of that, we've actually just done a really good job."

Gasly insists the team is not doing anything fundamentally wrong, and the non-scores were simply a sequence of unfortunate events.

"I think looking at Qualifying, we qualified in the Q3s in all three races, four including the Sprints," the Frenchman said. "So the pace in quali has been good. In the race it was mixed bag of unlucky events – looking at the Baku race, in Sepang that was kind of like 50:50 with the starting tyre, and we got it wrong unfortunately, and Singapore, which I think unfortunately highlighted the main limitation of the car that we have in a race at the moment.

"So it was just all compacted in these three weeks, and obviously we've been very disappointed, because we had we lost a lot of ground to VCARB, and we expected quite a lot more points at the end of it."

One-lap speed vs race trim

It has been a trend that the car is more competitive over one lap than in race trim — related to tyre usage — although Colapinto suggests the gap in form is perhaps not as marked as it appears.

"I feel like we've been competitive in general on Saturdays for sure," he said. "On Sundays we've been strong as well. For the most part of the year, we were up there, and the races have been fighting for points. We look super strong.

"It's true that for me, Malaysia is tricky to say because of the weather, and the roughness of the track I think was something very specific. But then, in general Baku, Madrid, the hot races, we were in this very hot European season, and we were strong on Sundays. So I don't think it's something to be super concerned [about].

"I think we are normally stronger on Saturday than Sundays. That's a reality. But it's not that we are slow on Sundays. We are good, and we are looking to extract more pace of the car."

Gasly eyes a Brazil-style turnaround

Gasly says P5 is not lost — and he is hoping history repeats itself. Alpine famously scored 33 points in a single sodden afternoon when Esteban Ocon and Gasly finished second and third at Interlagos in the 2024 season.

"I think personally, I just want to take it race-by-race," Gasly said. "It's a big gap. At the same time, with that team I've seen back in 2024 we've had that amazing double podium in Brazil, and all of a sudden we had plenty of points scored.

"So it's never impossible. It's a tough challenge, but I think we've just got to take one race at a time, trying to do the best job we can. And then we'll do the maths at the end of the year."