Williams Formula 1 driver Franco Colapinto is a serious Red Bull target but there is a key hurdle to overcome in order to act on its interest.
Red Bull is in the process of reshaping its driver line-ups across its two F1 teams to be more competitive now and be better set up for the long-term.
The prospect of Liam Lawson replacing Sergio Perez at the senior team alongside Max Verstappen is growing after two good weekends since replacing Daniel Ricciardo in the second RB seat alongside Yuki Tsunoda for the rest of 2024.
That, combined with Perez enduring a self-described “terrible” season and having a particularly woeful most recent weekend at his home race in Mexico, has raised expectations that Lawson could get a rapid promotion for 2025.
Should that happen, Red Bull will need another driver to partner Tsunoda at RB next season, but leading junior Isack Hadjar is not thought to be ready. Presently, the F2 title contender looks more likely to get a 2025 reserve driver and testing programme.
But Red Bull has been impressed by Colapinto’s performances against the experienced and well-regarded Alex Albon at Williams, since getting the sudden chance to replace Logan Sargeant between the Dutch and Italian Grands Prix just after the summer break.
Colapinto has scored points twice, caught the eye with some bold driving, and taken F1 in his stride.
Though he just had his first real setback in Mexico, where he had easily his biggest qualifying deficit to Albon since his last-minute debut, the race was going well until he had a scrape with Lawson and he could have been a point-scorer yet again with a cleaner weekend.
That high ceiling is being noticed and has led Red Bull to start enquiring about what it would take to bring Colapinto into the fold.
In Mexico, Williams boss James Vowles not-that-cryptically dodged a question about whether Colapinto could drive for RB next season by answering “if you're in sensitive negotiations, you don't give away anything at this stage, so I can't really answer that”.
Colapinto is currently set to be Williams’s reserve driver in 2025 coupled with extensive testing in an old car as it prepares to run older machinery in private for the first time. If he remains in this position, Colapinto could also add a World Endurance Championship programme with Williams’s permission.
He has no immediate Williams F1 future beyond 2024 because it has already signed Carlos Sainz to partner Alex Albon from next year, and both have long-term contracts.
But while Williams has no short-term need for Colapinto, he is on a very long-term contract himself, understood to have been signed as part of the deal to get him in the F1 car for the rest of this season.
Red Bull has no interest in a loan deal, so extracting him is key. And if Red Bull gets carried away talking publicly about how highly it rates Colapinto and how much it wants him, then the price to do that will only increase.
That, on top of whatever it would take to drop Perez for Lawson, would make this an expensive combination of moves, and mean overlooking the Red Bull junior programme in the short-term.
There is also a significant additional commercial element to consider, which is the sponsorship Red Bull has from Perez’s primary backer, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim.
But what could work in Red Bull’s favour is that Slim has a direct connection to Colapinto as well. Colapinto is an ambassador for Claro, one of Slim’s brands, in Argentina and the two are believed to have been in communication for several years, even before Colapinto joined the F1 grid.
That has not translated into backing for his racing activities yet. But while Colapinto is not going to immediately be as big a marketing asset to the Latin American market as Perez is in Mexico, especially if he is only driving for the second Red Bull team, there may be a mutually beneficial arrangement to be had here.
Slim could keep backing a driver from the region, and by remaining involved with Red Bull his consortium of companies can continue to be represented across four cars on the grid. F1 is also believed to be very keen on Colapinto to broaden the championship’s reach in South America.
The outcome could therefore be that Lawson replaces Perez as a Red Bull Racing driver, and Colapinto plugs an obvious gap in the programme by partnering Tsunoda while also acting as something of a commercial surrogate for Perez.
It would be a win for everybody except Perez. But if Red Bull is not keen to pay to get hold of Colapinto then someone else has to, or its interest will go nowhere.
Joining the Red Bull family may be Colapinto’s only immediate chance of getting on the grid full-time.
The other 2025 vacancy is at Audi-owned Sauber, where there have been some conversations, but it is leaning towards either F2 points leader Gabriel Bortoleto or re-signing incumbent driver Valtteri Bottas.
In any case, while joining Sauber would be of interest in order to keep Colapinto on the grid, it would take a good offer to convince him to join F1's slowest team when the alternative is to stay at Williams with a nailed-on reserve and testing role and be poised to move into a race seat there or react to shifts in the driver market elsewhere.