Photo: Alpine F1 Team
Jack Doohan continued to progress at the wheel of Alpine’s A521 car as he completed another full day of Formula 1 testing at Monza earlier this month.
The 20-year-old is Alpine’s reserve driver as well as one of its juniors, and last year he drove the A521 – which was used in the 2021 F1 season – at Monza, which allowed him go a step further in his development with his latest test.
“We planned the session to try and make it a little bit more difficult for myself,” he told Formula Scout.
“With how busy the schedule has been this year, I didn’t have any time to do any simulator [running] prior to the test. But straight away I felt comfortable. I had a test at Silverstone before Baku, which went very well as well. So I’m feeling in a good place in that car at the moment.
“At Monza, we basically tried to make things a bit more difficult for myself and make it not so easy to drive and stable, and try and make me have to adjust things on my own and really venture out into some difficulties.
“All in, the day was really good. I think the track was a little bit better than last year as well when I was there, but I’ve taken quite a big step forward.”
Doohan hopes to take this positive trend from his F1 outings with Alpine into his Formula 2 season, which has not started as smoothly as he had hoped. The Australian sits in 13th in the standings, having scored points in just three out of eight races this year.
“Happy with that. And happy to have a better feeling in F2 as well as everything was going very well in the F1 testing.
“Unfortunately, some anomalies in our F2 campaign this year meant that I haven’t been able to really show my potential that I showed last year and really progress on that. So hopefully today is a starting point,” he said after the first day of F2’s Barcelona in-season testing two weeks ago.