Photo credit: Williams Racing
Following the Belgian Grand Prix, the last before the summer break, Alex Albon said that the tyre degradation suffered in Spa is a wake-up call for Williams after making 3 stops during the Grand Prix on Sunday.
Despite this, Albon still managed to make it into the top 10 of the race early on from 15th on the grid as the traffic queue formed behind Carlos Sainz allowed him to use the extraordinary straight line speed of the FW45 to pass cars with relative ease.
However, with the degradation of the medium tyres in the second and third stints, he was forced to make a third pit stop to put on soft tyres. The low downforce option meant Albon had to push too hard in the corners of sector 2 to avoid losing too much time.
“I had a good start today. However, I was almost surprised I fell out of the points in the mid-stint, but I was just struggling so much with degradation.
“The whole weekend was tricky, and the race was just the same. We’re running low downforce, which is fun but going through sector two, it degs the tyres so much.
“The amount of deg was a bit of a wake-up call, particularly on that Medium tyre. I was having to over-push the tyre to stay in front in sector two and as soon as I tried to manage the tyre, I was immediately under fire from cars behind, so it’s a vicious cycle.”
Albon has conceded Williams must learn and quickly improve on this with Monza hosting the second race following the summer break.
“I think we need to go away and work out why we struggled so much this weekend, as at the end of the day, this downforce is going to be similar to Monza and that’s our next occasion to likely score points.
“We’ll need to make sure we learn from this weekend, so when we come back to tracks that suit us, we don’t have this problem again.”
