With places 12 and 18 for Alexander Albon and Nicholas Latifi, the Williams team was beaten a little below value at the Mexican Grand Prix. Although both drivers retired in Q1 and had to start the race from the back, the Williams showed good pace.
“To be honest, I’m very satisfied,” said Albon after the race. “I feel like our pace was relatively strong considering where we were on Friday. We had some kind of technical problem at the start. The car had quite a bit of misfiring. So we dropped back to 19th place.”
“And then of course Fernando and Yuki dropped out, but we overtook everyone else either on the track or through our strategy. So I’m really happy. P6 was in sight, so that was a good race pace,” said the Thai.
Albon: Overtaking Vettel was the key
The Williams driver was on the right strategy because – unlike many other drivers – he was able to avoid the slow hard tire and switch directly from the medium tire to the soft tire. On lap 38, however, the tire change happened fairly early, so that Albon had to drive on the softer compound for almost half the race.
When asked how difficult it was to go easy on the soft tires early in the stint, he says: “It’s a thermal race and the ‘dirty air’ is terrible here because the brakes get hot and that makes “The tires are hot. The downforce is then of course gone, and you really need clean air here to protect the tires.”
“But everyone has so much to do that you end up in a kind of procession where everyone is just managing their tyres. So we did well to find the clean air gaps in our strategy,” he explains.
Albon adds: “What really changed our race was the fact that we stuck to Sebastian [Vettel] passed because I think that allowed us to get clean air with the tires and move further up the front.”
Latifi wonders about weak pace
With his good pace, the Thai also managed to lap his teammate Nicholas Latifi, who, however, had damage to his Williams car, as he confirmed after the race.
“I’m convinced that we had something earlier in the race,” said the Canadian. “But the team just told me there was something towards the end. So I’m not entirely sure why I was told that so late because obviously at one point I could tell I was two or three seconds slower than I should have been. So that was a thing to forget.”
Already at the beginning of the race, Latifi was surprised about his weak pace: “I drove against the Haas’ and it seemed like everyone had everything under control. But the grip wasn’t that great and since I had the cars around me I could see I was suddenly two or three seconds a lap slower than everyone else, but I couldn’t see exactly where.”
The Canadian suspects that he might have hit a curb too hard: “I would assume so,” he says. “I didn’t hit anyone. I can only assume it was something with the underbody. I mean, we’ve seen it before where we could damage something without it affecting the balance too much. But it was easy the grip. So yes, a race to forget.”