Alex Albon: I can take advice from Alonso, be friends with Norris and still win F1 races
Morning Wire sat down with Williams Racing’s Alex Albon to chat F1 friendships in the modern era, where his team are and entertaining in Las Vegas.
When the starting lights went out in Sao Paulo 11 days ago and 19 cars accelerated towards the first bend, Williams Racing driver Alex Albon would have been hoping to survive the opening laps and eventually complete a third successive point-scoring drive for his team, who have struggled in recent years.
But the 27-year-old British-Thai racer instead was dealt a bad hand and tangled with Nico Hulkenberg and Kevin Magnussen. His Brazilian Grand Prix came to an end before he’d turned into the first corner.
Driving for Williams has not always been the easiest job and Albon, alongside rookie American Logan Sargeant, has had to battle against his own single-seater across 20 races so far in 2023 to be in a position where the team can achieve their best result in the constructor standings, seventh, since 2017.
Relative success for Albon
Formerly of Red Bull, Albon’s 2023 points total of 27, with two races remaining – Las Vegas this weekend and Abu Dhabi at the end of the month – has surpassed his 2022 total to the sum of 23 points. Williams are making progress.
“It’s been a great year for us — it’s all relative. We always want more but looking where we were last year, we’ve made a great step forward,” Albon tells City A.M.
“I don’t think we’ve always had the seventh quickest car but we’ve made sure that we’ve taken advantage of the moments when we have had it.
“I’ve enjoyed my racing. It’s exciting because coming from last year, where a great result would be P15 or P14, you wouldn’t take much satisfaction out of that now.”
Albon notes that better results mean more prize money for the team to invest in developing the car, but says the benefits aren’t just financial.
‘Winning is addictive’
“It also makes us hungry for more. I think when you’re on that upward trajectory and you’re feeling that momentum building and growing, that’s addictive,” he adds.
“And when I walk into the factory, you really get this sense that we are on the rise and everyone’s putting in the hours to score more and more points and hopefully get some podiums.”
Albon may only be 27 but he has been in the sport for five seasons, making him a veteran among many peers.
Sargeant, 22 from Fort Lauderdale, scored his first Formula 1 point on home soil when he finished 10th at the Circuit of the Americas in Texas last month.
This weekend the paddock returns to the trashy but incredible glitz of Las Vegas for the first time since 1982, with a new circuit using the famous Strip as one of the straights.
For Albon, though, it’s an excuse to slightly chill out ahead of the race weekend with his US teammate expected to take up the brunt of the work.
Brotherly love
“I give him as much [advice] as I can. I have been in that position, I know what it feels like,” Albon says.
“We do our job so in some ways we don’t really get to see the showbiz of it. But there is an element, especially around you, when you can feel this energy. I can relate it to Miami, where everyone’s having a good time.
“There’s definitely some alcohol floating around and it’s actually quite different because you’re in a completely different mindset to 99 per cent of the people who are at the racetrack.
“But it will be great, I think it’s great for Formula 1. It shows how much F1 is growing, it’s an entertainment industry at the end of the day and we [Williams] are in some ways as well.
“We are a half-American team so we have a lot of partners there. It does mean that we can be very busy for the whole thing but I enjoy it and it’s fun to see Logan living his American dream..
“This was one of the positives about Logan coming to the team, and to be fair he does do more work than me when we’re in America. I wouldn’t say not by much but not by enough, I would rather him do more of it!
“I pick up the torch when we go to Singapore and Japan. It’s quite funny to see Logan at the track on a Thursday because he seems destroyed [because of pre-race work].”
Albon in a sweatbox
But the season has been no breeze, with Williams often fighting for single points rather than podiums. And in Qatar, when Sargeant was looking to prove himself worthy of a contract for the 2024 season, it all got a little bit too much for the drivers.
Some almost fainted, Alpine’s Esteban Ocon vomited in his helmet and many were sent to the doctor at the end of the race. But as Albon explains, it’s not just the climate in the Middle East that causes extreme issues for drivers.
“The heat comes from the engine behind us and everyone’s so close to the ground,” he says. “The downforce is to run the car as low as you can so every bump, every curb that you ride, there’s a lot of friction and scraping on the floor.
“You see a lot of sparks coming off the car, and that’s basically like a heat warmer. So you’re getting heat from the back from your engine, but then you’re getting the heat from your bum and from the floor.
“You’re just in a sweatbox and then that’s where it gets tricky. The humidity as well, we were quite lucky at the start of the year in Europe, it was quite cool, but we went into the Middle East and it was just very hot.”
If that wasn’t enough of a literal pain in the bum, some racers of years gone by – notably former Le Mans winner Hans-Joachim Stuck – have said that the grid today is far too friendly.
Fun and games?
Drivers stream games together, are seen together on Monaco outings, and papped fist- bumping around the paddock. But it’s not all niceties; these elite sportspeople have been rivals on the track and friends off it for years.
“I don’t know what it is,” Albon says. “There’s definitely an element in the olden days of a little bit more driver versus driver, boxing gloves out, more rivalry in the sense that there was a clear display of hatred towards each other.
“I agree that certainly fizzled out in a way that we will live pretty much in the same place, in Monaco. There’s been a generation of 22 to 27-year-olds who have all raced each other prior to Formula 1.
“Once the helmet goes on we are enemies but once we get that helmet off again, we enjoy it. It is part of who we are. We’d be at each other’s throats [if we weren’t friends].
“Even older ones like Fernando [Alonso], you would say he might be a bit more old-school or aggressive, but he’s not. He’s a great guy, he gets on with all of us. He offers us advice or talks to us about offering to share [private jet] flights.
Retirement party
“We went out for dinner in Abu Dhabi last year [for Sebastian Vettel’s retirement] just because that hadn’t been done in a very long time and the vibes and laughs that evening were great. It just shows that, like everything, times change and there’s no need for such things [as off-field rivalry].
“You can be competitors just like Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer. They were at the top of their game but they were still very good friends.”
A glance at Instagram shows the drivers occupied a private room at Hakkasan at Emirates Palace, which doesn’t come cheap. So maybe F1 is no longer in an era of fierce, sometimes dangerous rivalries. But it is no less exciting.
And who knows; as the travelling circus that is the paddock heads to the city of casinos it could be Albon who takes a risk, hits the jackpot and claims Williams Racing’s first podium in over two years. It’s surely worth the gamble.