Gone are the days when Williams was at the bottom of Formula 1. Lando Norris is pleased that there is now a team up front and Max Verstappen says the FW45 is a “very competitive” car. And the 2023 Dutch Grand Prix in Zandvoort was good evidence of the upward trend of the once successful team, which has not won a World Championship since 1997 and a Grand Prix since 2012.
Alexander Albon destroyed his teammate Logan Sargeant in qualifying to finish fourth and was ultimately beaten in the race to finish eighth. “I think we were on par with Aston and Ferrari this weekend,” said the 27-year-old Thai.
The big question after the race: what would have been possible if Williams hadn’t waxed thoroughly at the beginning when it started to rain just in time for the start? After nine laps, as the rain eased off and the dry tires gradually picked up speed, Albon was already 50 seconds behind Fernando Alonso (5th) and 45 on Carlos Sainz (6th).
Albon had not yet made a pit stop and was now back on the better tire with the soft tires on the drying track. Alonso and Sainz, on the other hand, had to switch from intermediates to dry tires. After their pit stops, Alonso (5th) was 19 and Sainz (7th) 13 seconds ahead of Albon (12th).
That’s how well Albon was able to keep up with the top
That was on lap 12. Albon now had tires that were ten laps older. Nevertheless, he was able to reduce his gap to Alonso by three seconds before the first safety car phase on lap 16.
Because he decided not to switch back and forth at all, but to stick with the soft tires, Albon’s first stint ended up being 44 laps long. “And we lost maybe two seconds to the Aston and Ferrari throughout the stint. Although my tires were ten laps older. We were really strong,” he analyses.
Also: “We overtook a Mercedes. Admittedly with tire advantage at the time. But in order to be able to overtake on this track, you have to be one to one and a half seconds faster than the car in front. And we still managed it.”
Not switched to intermediates: A wrong decision
Albon thought “after the first five or six laps that that was it with the points. But we pulled through, which I think was really important. You can argue about whether we shouldn’t have stopped earlier to get the Inter to pick up. But what we did was still better than what George did for example.”
George Russell in the Mercedes was still in the lead at the end of the third lap because many had pitted in front of him. At that point he was three seconds ahead of Albon. On lap 4 he dropped to 10th, half a minute behind the leader but six seconds ahead of Albon – and only then came to change tyres.
Russell was now on better tires than Albon, but when he switched back to slicks on lap 10 he was half a minute behind the Williams. Conclusion: The best drivers were those who changed immediately in lap 1, or in lap 2 at the latest. Or, as Williams team boss James Vowles puts it: “You either come in on lap 2 – or you stay out.”
He says: “A few teams changed after that, but I think once you’ve made your decision, go for it!” In hindsight, it wasn’t “a catastrophe, but it was a wrong decision,” admits Vowles, explaining: “When the rain stopped, we thought it would get better quickly. But the loss of time on the Intermediate was significant.”
Albon: Williams has never been so good
From lap 10 it was a normal race at first, and now Williams was able to demonstrate his pace: “It was a mammoth stint, 44 laps on the soft. You can only do that if the car is good. And that was it. It It was very easy to control the dismantling and I could always turn the balance the way I needed it,” says Albon.
“It was our best weekend so far,” he says. “I’ve never had such a good feeling during my time at Williams. I think we were a bit unlucky because we didn’t take as many risks as others and raised Inter. Because it was a risk. When they switched, The track didn’t yield any Inters yet. That only changed during the lap after that.”
“We thought the rain wouldn’t last long and wouldn’t come as intensely. That was like in Thailand – a real monsoon shower! But when you get in there it’s already too late. Ten seconds and everything was upside down. Usually it starts to rain lightly first and then comes the full shower. But this time it was like turning on a light switch!”
Nevertheless: At the time of his switch from soft to medium, Albon was in fifth place after 44 laps, 14 seconds behind Alonso. “After that we kept catching up. I was heading towards P4 and I thought it was going really perfectly now. Then they told me it would start raining again in five minutes. Not again!”
Wrong timed second pit stop too
And Williams managed to sleep through the pit stop a second time. “We have to look at that,” says Albon. “In the first half of the lap I still thought it would work out perfectly, now we’re overcutting them all. It was dry then. But then it suddenly went from slick to full-wet within seconds. I could only do the last four corners to sneak.”
Vowles knows: “At the second stop we were a lap late. It’s easy to determine that now. The difficult thing is to develop a method afterwards that, with all the information that is available to you, you can use a can make better decisions.”
When lap 61 started, Albon was 4.7 seconds behind Sainz in sixth place. After the pit stop he was ninth and Sainz was suddenly 15.1 seconds behind. A single lap too late cost ten seconds of racing time. “In that sense, I’m a bit disappointed with 8th place. We should have been sixth,” sighs the Williams driver.
Finally satisfied with 8th place
Vowles nods: “One tends to get greedy. If I had been offered eighth place before the race, I would have taken it and said thank you. But the truth is: we were sixth in the race and we drove away from the Alpine. We made a wrong decision at the last stop. Otherwise sixth place would have been possible. Then you’ll be disappointed.”
But: “You have to see it differently. As a team, we strive for improvements and a positive direction. We’re on track now. There are tracks where we’re strong. That won’t be the case in all races, and we know that I. But it’s enough that we’re now sole seventh in the Constructors’ Championship, and from there we’re looking further ahead.”
Already in a week in Monza, on a low-downforce track that Williams should meet on paper: “Before the season we identified a few races that could be good for us. Monza is definitely one of them,” says Vowles. “Last year the team scored good points there. I think that’s possible this year too.”
And Albon also gained “a lot of self-confidence” for Monza in Zandvoort, although he remains cautious: “We tried a few set-ups this weekend that worked well. But I think they only work on high-downforce tracks. In that sense, we’ve learned a lot. Now we’ll have to wait and see what happens in Monza.”