Alex Albon admits that his Williams FW46 still has “some problems” despite what he called a “luxurious” result for the team in the Azerbaijan GP.
Albon finished seventh in Baku and his rookie team mate Franco Colapinto was eighth as the team bagged 10 points and jumped its close rivals Alpine for eighth place in the constructors’ championship.
However despite the ostensibly similar nature of the venues Albon is cautious about the car’s potential in Singapore this weekend, noting that the team has items to test on Friday.
“I would say Singapore historically has been maybe the worst track of the year for us,” he said when asked by form1ua.uno about his prospects. “A hot track, a lot of tyre overheating problems.
“As good as the car was this weekend, there’s still some problems with it. We’ve got some items we want to test for next week in FP1 and FP2. Hopefully we can come up with a better solution for Singapore.”
Nevertheless Albon agreed that the Baku result was a boost for the team, and a clear sign that recent upgrades are working.
“I think we’re in front of Alpine now, which was the target at the end of the year,” he said.
“We were talking before about how difficult P10 and P9 was, so to get a P7 and a P8 is luxurious.
“We’ll take that and, yeah it shows that we’ve made great progress with the upgrade again.
“That’s another points finish. That’s another weekend where we’ve been positively quick, I think, very similar to the Aston Martin in terms of pace. Let’s see next week. But for this weekend, it’s been very strong.”
Albon was the highest placed driver on the Baku grid to start on the hard tyres, and his long first stint saw him mixing it with the leaders after they had pitted, while also holding off fellow hard starter Lando Norris.
“We did a different strategy to pretty much the majority of the grid,” he said. “I don’t think it was the quickest strategy in the end.
“The reason for that was the amount of time we lost with the top teams in that midfield fight when I think I was getting overtaken by everyone, Oscar, Charles and Checo.
“It was 6-7 seconds of race time that would have put us quite easily in front of Fernando, I think, on a race pace. But that was actually because we were almost too quick.
“We thought they were going to come out in front of us, and I would have carried on on my own race, but actually they came out behind me.”
Regarding his time loss while running with the leaders he added: “I wasn’t trying to race them. I was trying to reduce as much lap time as possible, but it was almost identical to blue flags, because I had worn tyres, and then I was getting all the dirty air.
“I was losing a lot of tyre temperature when I was fighting them. So actually it wasn’t that enjoyable. I was hoping they would pull away a little bit quicker.”
Albon was frustrated that he didn’t get a chance to attack Alonso in the closing laps after the Perez/Sainz collision.
“I would like to have seen, because I just got within DRS as the crash happened,” he said.
“But to be honest with you, it’s not that easy to overtake Fernando obviously, and he was on a lower rear wing, so I don’t think it would be that easy.”
