Alpine has been dragged into publishing an open letter defending its treatment of Franco Colapinto, an unusual move by an F1 team but a reflection of just how intense the online noise around the Argentinian has become after his Japanese Grand Prix collision with Haas rookie Oliver Bearman.
The team's rebuttal was unambiguous.
"Any questions about sabotage or not giving Franco the same car are completely unfounded," Alpine said in the statement.
The incident itself — a 50G impact at Suzuka that ended Bearman's race — has been the flashpoint for a wider argument about whether 2026's closing speeds are simply more than drivers can safely manage. Bearman himself kept his public comment short.
"Colapinto didn't give me much space," he said.
Analysts reviewing the crash were careful not to pin the blame entirely on Colapinto.
"I think it's more like the closing speeds are so insane, like so insane that he would have seen him last minute," one reviewer said. "And I'm not surprised in some ways that a driver would react like that. Like you you always tried to react to defend your position. It was too late. He reacted too late."
That reading lines up with concerns Fernando Alonso and others have been raising publicly for weeks, that the gap in battery deployment and straight-line energy between cars in 2026 is creating closing speeds the sport did not plan for.
"I think the drivers concerns are absolutely you know spoton," one commentator said of Alonso's warnings. "They've mentioned it a lot of them not just Alonso has mentioned that the closing speeds is the thing they're most concerned about and this incident right here we've we've seen exactly that."
Colapinto, before the Suzuka weekend turned sour, had been genuinely upbeat about a better second season in Formula 1 and an Alpine car closer to the midfield than it was 12 months ago.
"Um, I'm happier, of course, that when you can fight a bit further up, it it makes you feel more confident and makes you, you know, give that extra little bit in in different situations," he said ahead of the race. "And I think when you are so close to get through Q3 to you know when you're in the fight it is different and last year unfortunately we didn't have that this year is looking much better and um of course the car steps and it's looking much closer to our teams and that I think also knowing that you we have a lot of performance coming or that we see many different things to improve."
He also described how the new power-unit rules were genuinely changing the feel of wheel-to-wheel racing.
"Fighting cars with a different PU because I think that energy management is different between the teams and between the the different PU manufacturers and then it becomes a bit um a bit easier I think to to fight to defend as well bit more difficult but it it kind of brings battles a bit closer with each other because it's so different where the teams use the energies which makes it bit more interesting," Colapinto said.
Alpine's letter will not silence every corner of the online debate. But the team has at least made sure its position is now a matter of public record: equal machinery, no hidden agenda, and a continued commitment to the driver its fans still pack the grandstands for.