Italian Grand Prix data: Key Williams trait to fire Franco Colapinto to debut points?
Franco Colapinto successfully completed his first Friday as an official F1 2024 in practice at the Italian Grand Prix at Monza.
The new Williams driver ran successfully bringing the car home untouched and accumulating valuable laps ahead of qualifying and the race at the Italian Grand Prix.
Italian Grand Prix F1 data: Franco Colapinto’s debut analysed
Colapinto had a quiet FP1 session in which he tested both soft and medium tyres.
The Argentine driver gained confidence with the car and the soft tyre after two installation laps at the beginning of the session.
Williams didn’t force Colapinto to push for a good lap time as apparently did Mercedes with Andrea Kimi Antonelli.
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His best time of 1:22.880 in Friday’s first session was done on his second try on the soft tyre.
From there, he did another push lap before returning to the garage to complete a long run.
At the end of FP1, Colapinto was back on the medium tyre with which he did his installation laps and completed a positive race simulation.
Good consistency in his lap times and no big mistakes.
However, on the last lap he had a small driving mistake at Parabolica which he managed to correct to prevent him from ending up against the tyre wall like Andrea Kimi Antonelli did.
In Colapinto’s favour, it is worth mentioning that he was already running on 17 laps old medium tyres when he ran into the gravel.
Compared to team-mate Alex Albon, we can see that Colapinto has clearly run on more fuel and/or a more conservative engine map to help him feel more comfortable with the car.
The differences with his team-mate are too significant to think that both were running on the same car setup conditions.
In the FP2 session, Colapinto was able to be more aggressive in his qualifying attempt.
In addition, he set the highest top speed of the weekend so far, reaching 353 km/h.
Compared to his FP1 lap, Colapinto had more top speed available on his Williams and we can also see that he had more freedom to push the limits in the 11 corners of the Monza circuit.
On the other hand, in terms of long runs, Williams also allowed Colapinto to test the soft tyre in terms of race conditions.
Once again, he accumulated a positive run in which the degradation of the soft tyre was evident after several laps of use.
Only he and Daniel Ricciardo tried this tyre in FP2.
Colapinto has one more practice session in FP3 before heading into qualifying and finally facing Alex Albon and the rest of Williams’ rivals on equal terms.
The Grove team seems to have a good feeling at Monza where the high top speed of their car can make them stand out in the midfield against Aston Martin and Haas.
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