‘It was a really good and smooth thing,’ Alpine junior Jack Doohan discusses ‘amazing’ post-season Abu Dhabi test
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Jack Doohan at the 2022 post-season test on November 22 (IMAGO / PanoramiC)
It’s been a great couple of months for Jack Doohan. When his fellow Australian (and Alpine junior) Oscar Piastri chose to go to McLaren, Doohan did his best to put himself front and centre for consideration about a potential seat, reserve or otherwise. His efforts paid off, and he will likely be the team’s reserve driver for 2023. Moreover, he also participated in the practice sessions that would have gone to Piastri.
He also recently took part in the post-season test with Alpine. When asked about his thoughts on the test by Speedcafe.com, Doohan said: “It’s all exciting. I had two FP1s this year, which were awesome. Mexico, which was cut short, and then I had this week in Abu Dhabi. But to be honest, like the whole session [last Friday], I can only think of Formula 2, in a way, because that was still my main goal.”
It was an important F2 weekend for Doohan, but it certainly could have gone better. In the feature race, the Australian stayed out the longest time of any of the medium tyre runners and would’ve come out in fifth with much fresher tyres than the others, only for his tyre to detach from the car as he came out of the pits. He was 4th going into the weekend but eventually ended the championship in sixth.
As it was such an important weekend, he was rather conservative in his practice session, and also aware of how different an F1 car feels to drive compared to an F2 car, in which he was going to do his actual racing: “It was a back-to-back session of Qualifying, so I did not want to have any issues coming through. So every time I’d kind of do something to a corner I’d think, ‘oh, you can’t do that in a Formula 2 car.’”
Jack Doohan: Amazing to have a day where I could completely focus on F1
Freed from the limitations of the Formula 2 weekend coinciding with his practice session, Jack Doohan could finally concentrate completely on a Formula 1 car. The young Australian finished 12th in the session, +0.608 seconds off the man who will be moving to Alpine and completing an all-French roster, Pierre Gasly.
Doohan felt ‘amazing’ that he was able to just focus on F1: “So it was amazing to have a full day where I could just completely and solely focus on Formula 1 and really extract everything from it. We ran through everything that we did, executed all plans, we didn’t have any issues with the car. So it was a really good and smooth thing.”
Doohan will certainly be helped by his increasing experience in a Formula 1 car: Even if Alpine do not put him in an F1 seat soon enough for his liking, he can try to show the best version of himself in the limited track time he does get, which includes practice sessions and the Abu Dhabi test. He feels this test and learning to make ‘adaptions’ will be ‘super beneficial’ for him next year, when he gets the ‘hop back in the company.’
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Aniket Tripathi
(1002 Articles Published)