When Alpine's controversial early Formula 1 driver change happened barely a month ago, Alpine boss Flavio Briatore asked only three things of Franco Colapinto: "he needs to be fast, not crash, and score points".

Alpine only gave its rookie Jack Doohan six grands prix before bringing Colapinto in the expectation he would be a clear upgrade.

But in three races since replacing Doohan, Colapinto is 0 for 3 in meeting Briatore’s demands - and this move is really not working out as planned.

Like his predecessor, Colapinto hasn’t scored a point so far, although he’s had half the number of races Doohan did.

He’s shunted out of qualifying at Imola, spent a tricky first F1 weekend in Monaco off the pace, then looked slow again in Spain at the outset. It seemed like a much-need improvement was on the cards in qualifying - only for Colapinto to miss his final Q1 run with a technical problem that he might have accidentally caused himself.

Unfortunately, Barcelona was irreversibly compromised by that qualifying problem, and Colapinto was consigned to a third race in a row spent stuck near the back of the field.

Despite Briatore’s subsequent claims to the contrary, Alpine said Colapinto had five races before a new evaluation ahead of the British Grand Prix at Silverstone in July. And Briatore laid out three key targets for Colapinto to meet.

He’s more than halfway into his supposed guaranteed time in the seat as Alpine works out what to do with its driver line-up long-term, and by this point of his Williams cameo last year – which is a valid comparison given that was another mid-season switch into a car Colapinto had little knowledge of – Colapinto looked a much more convincing midfield asset.

So a full triple-header is at least enough to do an initial evaluation of how Colapinto is getting on against Briatore’s own instructions.

Has he been fast?

No.

Colapinto didn’t really show much of a spark during the triple-header and is averaging a four tenths of a second deficit to Gasly in Q1.

By comparison Doohan was only 0.126s slower than Gasly in their Q1 appearances, although the average grows to 0.271s when factoring in a heavy Q2 deficit in Bahrain (and a big Q2 margin in Australia is discounted as it is skewed by a yellow flag).

So far, Colapinto has been a step down from Doohan on one-lap pace, and he admits that getting more out of the car on low fuel is his main priority to improve. A Q1 shunt at Imola helped him technically get into Q2 there but obviously he didn’t take part, and he did not make it out of Q1 in Monaco or Spain.

At Barcelona he had got encouragingly close to Gasly in practice (0.131s adrift) although was still on a three-run programme in Q1, thus needing to burn an extra set of softs.

But after a solid second Q1 run, which was slightly faster than Gasly’s first (completed when the track was slower), Colapinto didn’t get his third effort, which was a shame as this looked like it might genuinely be a more competitive showing. This would have been especially encouraging given Colapinto was missing the latest floor upgrade, which is not thought to be a significant laptime gain, but has still left him at a small disadvantage. 

Grinding to a halt in the pitlane was the cause. That seemed unlucky, although Alpine has been a little unclear about the cause of the problem.

Colapinto got caught out by the queue building after joining the fast lane, to the point of half-taking evasive action behind Gasly, which was accompanied by a horrible clunking audible from his onboard camera. Immediately, the car lost drive and all Colapinto trying to accelerate achieved was the creation of more nasty sounds.