Can Alpine bounce back and take the P5 fight to Racing Bulls?

The battle between Racing Bulls and Alpine for fifth place in the World Championship has been one of the subplots of the 2026 season, and at the moment it’s 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. It’s left the former with a handy advantage of 32 points with six rounds to go, including this weekend’s United States Grand Prix at COTA.

That’s a decent lead, but it’s not done yet, given that Alpine famously scored 33 points in a single soggy afternoon when Esteban Ocon and Pierre Gasly finished second and third at Interlagos in 2024.

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, but that hasn’t been translated into results – most infamously in Azerbaijan, where Franco Colapinto and Gasly collided.

In contrast, Racing Bulls have generally capitalised on their opportunities, notwithstanding the contact between Arvid Lindblad and Liam Lawson in the same event.

“There's been quite a few races we haven't really been as quick as them, but we've outscored them,” says the New Zealander. “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.”

Alpine’s challenge is to bounce back from the recent difficult run and score consistently over the remaining races.

“It's clear that we lost the last triple header, and we need to win this one,” says Colapinto. “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.”

It’s been a trend that the car has been more competitive over one lap than in race trim – related to tyre usage – although Colapinto suggests that the difference in form is perhaps not as marked as you might think.

“I feel like we've been competitive in general on Saturdays for sure,” he says. “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 says that the team isn’t doing anything fundamentally wrong, and the run of non-scores over the last triple header was just a sequence of unfortunate events.

“I think looking at Qualifying, we qualified in the Q3s in all three races, four including the Sprints,” says the Frenchman. “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.”

Gasly insists that P5 isn’t lost – and he’s hoping that history repeats.

“I think personally, I just want to take it race-by-race,” he says. “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.”