Albon endured a difficult weekend at Imola with the FW46
Alex Albon insists that it’s not “doom and gloom” for the Williams Formula 1 team despite a difficult weekend in Imola.
Albon was left with a loose front wheel after his tyre stop and lost a lot of time returning to the pits. He also received a 10-second penalty for an unsafe release.
After that his race turned into a test session, and the team eventually told him to retire the car in the closing laps.
Earlier in the weekend team boss James Vowles had admitted that the FW46 is significantly overweight, at the expense of valuable lap time. The Emilia Romagna race saw the first steps taken in a weight-saving programme for the car.
Williams has yet to score a point in 2024, but Albon has downplayed any concerns.
“What’s positive – it’s not really a positive – is that kind of midfield, they’re not scoring a tremendous amount of points, so it’s not like we’re falling away and we can’t catch up,” he said.
“I think if you look at last year, we were in the same position, we scored I think it was one point at this point last year. And then we came on strong, albeit we had a big upgrade package that was coming to the car.
“This year now it’s a bit more obvious, but it’s more about taking the weight out of the car, and while we’re taking out weight others are still upgrading and still performing.
“So yeah, let’s see how it how it goes down. I think this weekend we took a little bit out of the car, which showed a little bit more competitiveness in the car in qualifying.
“Honestly. I don’t know how my race pace was. But I was kind of okay, I was in no man’s land. I didn’t have any tyres left after the issue. But in my head it’s not doom and gloom. We have a plan, if we didn’t have a plan I would I would call it doom and gloom.”
Albon said he knew fairly quickly that one of his front tyres was not fully secure after the stop.
“I didn’t feel it coming down the pits,” he said. “But as soon as I took the pit limiter off there was like a vibration, and then I could tell something was wrong.
“It was still attached, and when I was turning around corners you can see if the tyre’s going to fall off, but it would only go to a point and stop, so I could see it was quite safe. There was only about 10mm of movement on the tyre.”
Albon admitted that the race turned into a test session: “We were just trying some stuff, trying to figure out some of our braking feelings with the car, and just trying to see if there any solutions on the long run with the car we’ve got, just playing around with the brakes, basically. I don’t know if there’s much to say really, just driving around, experimenting.”
Albon conceded that he is unsure of the FW46’s potential in Monaco this weekend.
“It’s never been a track we’ve gone well, it’s actually a track that we’ve always struggled at,” he said.
“I think it’s one of those ones where I feel excited to go to tracks where we were not good, and see if they’re much better.
“I’m hoping Monaco is going to be a good example of a step forward of our foundation of our car. And then I’m interested to go to Canada and see if the car is strong, like it was last year.”
Adam Cooper F1 