Montoya defends Colapinto's aggression after three-car Baku pile-up ends his race

Juan Pablo Montoya has defended Franco Colapinto’s racing instincts after the Alpine driver caused a three-car retirement at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix in Baku, saying he admires drivers who treat safety car restarts as an opportunity rather than a moment to protect position.

Colapinto misjudged his braking point at Turn 1 during a safety car restart at the Baku City Circuit, locking up and running into team-mate Pierre Gasly. The impact sent Gasly into Lando Norris, and all three drivers were forced to retire from the race. Colapinto apologised immediately after the grand prix and admitted he had been “completely out of control”, drawing criticism from both Gasly and Norris.

Montoya, however, offered a more sympathetic reading of the incident. “I think he expected everybody to go pretty deep,” the former F1 driver explained. “The problem is when you’re so far back it’s like a traffic jam. Everybody backs off and backs off. And you see he brakes and he’s going to run over somebody. So he gets out of the way and gets to the inside, and he nearly stopped the car. He made a mistake and ran over the team-mate and he took Lando out as well. He made a mistake, but it was close.”

Montoya went further, framing Colapinto’s approach as a trait shared by the sport’s most aggressive racers. “The hard thing there is you’re aggressive; you see an opportunity, and I admire people that try,” he said. “Some people see the restart as, ‘I don’t want to lose a position,’ and Franco is the guy who wants to go and take it. When you’re always the guy, like Max Verstappen, who always sees an opportunity to take it, you’re going to make mistakes.”

The crash leaves Colapinto 12th in the drivers’ championship with 27 points, while Gasly sits 10th on 41 points. The incident will add to scrutiny of Colapinto’s form since joining Alpine, though Montoya’s defence from a driver who built his own reputation on bold, uncompromising racecraft carries weight in the paddock.