Formula 1 driver Alexander Albon explains why the Williams is not an easy car for rookies. He also had to really get to know and understand the car first.
Logan Sargeant will also compete for Williams in the 2024 Formula 1 season. This came as a surprise to some fans, because the American was almost consistently slower than teammate Alexander Albon in his rookie season in 2023 and also produced small pieces several times
At the end of the year, 27 of the 28 Williams World Championship points went to Albon’s account. Sargeant only scored points once in Austin – and that only because Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc were disqualified there. But Albon himself defends his teammate.
The former Red Bull driver explains that the Williams is not exactly an easy Formula 1 car for rookies. “It’s obvious to us that our car has a ‘big personality’ in a way. There’s a way you have to drive it,” he explains.
This means: The Williams wants to be driven in a very special way. An experience that Albon had to go through himself in 2022. “We did much better than last year,” said Albon, who explained that he first had to get to know the Williams in his first season.
“This year, at the beginning of a weekend in FT1, I knew the general balance problems of our car and knew about the strengths and weaknesses,” explains Albon, who therefore understood the problems “much faster” in 2023 and was able to “react” to them.
Albon emphasizes: “You have to have the experience”
When asked if that’s why Sargeant had such problems in his first season, Albon replied: “I think so.” Because it is “very easy” to make a mistake in a corner in the Williams. “You have to have the experience to understand it,” explains Albon.
Because even though he himself had two full Formula 1 seasons under his belt last year, that was difficult for him too. You have to know the weaknesses of the car and, on the other hand, “use” the strengths of the car correctly.
Albon gives an example: “This year, tuning the car for a specific corner before a long straight to ensure you are not vulnerable and overtaken makes a big difference to our final result.”
“Maybe it’s not always optimal,” said Albon, “but we have it [oft] “Managed to get the car over the line in a good position.”
With his experience, Albon brought Williams almost single-handedly to seventh place in the World Cup last season. But what exactly makes the Williams such a difficult car for rookies like Sargeant?
Albon goes back a bit and explains that, like other cars, there are better and worse corners and that the car has “good qualities and bad qualities”.
Albon: Williams becomes ‘unstable’ very quickly
The car has had these characteristics “for the past five or six years,” he reveals, emphasizing: “From last year to this year, the characteristics of the car haven’t really changed. We’ve just added more downforce.”
The biggest problem is that the car reacts very sensitively. He cites the race in Las Vegas as an example. Albon explains: “We have to drive with so much pressure at the front so that the car turns in in the slow corners. We oversteered far too much.”
“But that’s what we have to do. It’s always a compromise,” he says and continues: “If you have graining at the front, you have to put even more pressure on the front of the car so that the front tires don’t slip. And then that’s it it in fast corners […] so unstable at the entrance that you’re just slow.”
“So we are often quite restricted in terms of the way we have to drive the car, but also how we have to adjust the car. Our window is narrow,” he emphasizes, explaining that because of this sensitivity, so does the wind play a big role.
On some routes it works well, but on other routes if there is “a tailwind in a certain corner” or “the routes are too hot”, then you quickly run into problems. At least we now know the car’s weaknesses quite well.
“I would say we’ve spent a lot of this year trying to figure that out. Because the more we can find out about it, the more it will help us next year,” says Albon, emphasizing: “Our job next year is to [die Schwächen] as much as possible.” Regardless, things should get a little easier for Logan Sargeant in the second year.