Photo Credits: Williams Racing
In the days before his team secured P7 in the 2023 F1 Constructors’ Championship, Williams Racing driver, Alex Albon, reflected on the performance of his FW45 throughout the season. Albon explained the difference a year has made within the team and also sought to explain why the car has had so many ups and downs.
During Thursday’s media day of the 2023 F1 season closing Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, Alex Albon was asked to explain the FW45 apparent inconsistency in its performance. For those on the outside it is difficult to predict how the car will perform from one week to the next and Albon admitted that the team has spent a lot of the season trying to figure out why that is because “the more we can figure that out, the more it’s going to help us next year”. The Williams Racing star driver then wanted to find the best phrase to sum up the FW45 and settled on ‘it has a big personality’.
Such a statement is due to the fact that Williams Racing’s 2023 challenger cannot be consistently driven in the same way. The design of the corner impacts the performance significantly. A point Albon explained by making reference to the team’s impressive qualifying performance the previous weekend in Las Vegas.
“The peakiness of the car is pretty extreme in some places and I’ll give you an example. Like last weekend, we ran pretty aggressive rim heating to get the tyres to work for the cold track temperatures it’s what gave us a great result — P5 P6 but our car was not P5 P6 on paper it was maybe P9 P10 and likely we compromised too much of the Sunday car for Saturday,” Albon claimed.
Such a statement was well supported by the fact that a ‘P5 qualifying Albon’ became a ‘P12 race finish Albon’ by the conclusion of the much-hyped Vegas spectacle. Albon predicted the result long before the chequered flag as he told the media that within three laps, he was overheating the tyres. However, this being said, the FW45 has been consistent on race weekends throughout the majority of the season. It is just that consistency would be that the car would either perform well or it wouldn’t one racetrack to the next. These are the kind of issues which Albon says the team is trying to fix next year.
The impact that track layout has on the FW45 was further highlighted by Albon as he provided a detailed explanation as to the issues the team faced in São Paulo.
“There are corners in Brazil — there’s maybe four of them — that we’re losing a tenth and a half in each corner and we can’t get round them, we can’t stop front locking we can’t stop understeering off the track. At the same time, in Monza, we don’t really have a limitation it doesn’t seem to hurt us because a lot of the braking is straight line. We don’t need to combine too much.
“So that’s where you see peaks so much because our car has good qualities and bad qualities. Our job next year is to get rid of them as much as we can. That’s been in the car for the last 5 or 6 years and hopefully next year we can finally make some inroads in it. But being honest with you from last year to this year, the car characteristic didn’t really change that much — it’s just we added more downforce to it,” Albon stated.
Williams Racing are aware they have a long to go to return to the Championship winning days of old, but the improvement made within a year is clear for all to see. Key to this has obviously been the points haul from Albon and he explained to reporters that the reason his performance is improved is because last year he was learning every race weekend he would go into.
“I would think ‘well this corner doesn’t suit our car’ and I would spend a couple of sessions with my tools and with my setup trying to fix these issues. This year, when I would go into every weekend in FP1, I already knew the general balance promised by my car,” Albon said.
“I knew the strengths and weaknesses and I’ve been able to react to the problems much more — understanding much quicker — and I’ve been much more on the front foot compared to last year,”
Albon was on superb form in 2023 and there is every reason to expect that the popular racer will continue on the front foot in 2024. Should Williams Racing address their car’s issues in a timely manner, then their star driver may find himself qualifying in P5 regularly. Not only this, but he may also finally have a car underneath him on race day which allows him to stay there.
