Jack Doohan slams FAKE Colapinto news amid family abuse

Formula 1 star Jack Doohan has hit back at online trolls who subjected his family to abuse on social media during the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix weekend.

The Alpine driver was replaced by reserve driver Franco Colapinto after six races of the 2025 campaign, with the latter making his race debut for the team at Imola on Sunday.

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But the Argentine got off to a miserable start, crashing out during qualifying before finishing down in 16th on Sunday afternoon.

The fallout began when F1 parody account, formulafakers, created a fake Instagram post - attributed to Doohan's father, Mick - showing Colapinto's damaged car from Saturday's session strewn on the gravel with an accompanying caption which included laughing emojis and a comment which read: "Very impressive."

That sparked outrage from Colapinto supporters, who vented their anger towards the Doohan family on social media, prompting the Australian to respond with an emotional plea on Instagram.

"As you can clearly see, the story circulating above is completely false," wrote the Australian. "It was fabricated by Argentine fans trying to portray me and my family in a negative light.

"They edited the original content to make it appear as though my father posted it, which is entirely untrue.

"Please stop harassing my family. I didn't think I would have to get to this point."

The 22-year-old later confirmed that the source was not Argentine, but said 'multiple Argentine outlets falsely reported the fabricated image'.

Doohan family receives apology

Formulafakers have since apologised for their involvement in a statement which read: "The Doohan family does not deserve to be attacked in the way they evidently were for our fake news post.

"We did not expect this post to cause any damage. We deeply, sincerely apologise to the Doohan family.

"This has been a wake up call on the real, tangible effects of social media. Our original post had been left up in an effort for it to be attached to our clarification that our account posts fake news.

"Luckily, news outlets had taken down their posts, but, unfortunately, it had already reached the general public and the damage was done.

"Again, we are sorry. It was never, ever our intention to draw hate towards any driver, and we should have made it more transparent that we are a parody account."

It wasn't the only regrettable episode to have taken place in Imola over the weekend, with FIA chief Mohamed Ben Sulayem releasing a statement condemning online driver abuse following an incident between Colapinto and Red Bull's Yuki Tsunoda during practice.

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