Palmer believes Williams acted wrongly

During the Australian race weekend, the Williams team made headlines for an unenviable reason: it was only able to send one car to the start, while the second was seriously damaged during practice. Jolyon Palmer, former Formula 1 driver and now expert on the championship’s official website, believes that Williams acted wrongly in that situation.

Before the start of the season, the teams try to work on chassis development until the last minute, so that they assemble their cars at the very last minute before the start of the season. This year, Williams stayed the longest and their first car only hit the track the day before the start of winter testing – the team explained this with an aggressive approach that involved overhauling the entire process of creating a car.

Obviously the team brought the second FW46 to Bahrain for the first stage of the season a week later, but it’s downright baffling that Williams couldn’t even prepare a spare chassis for the third race.

In Melbourne the team ended up in an extremely unpleasant situation for both drivers, but the responsibility for this lies with Alex Albon. I have no doubt that Williams warned its drivers in advance how they would act in such circumstances, although this is not the way to prepare for races in modern Formula 1. And of course it was in vain that Albon completely modified the car the beginning of the weekend crashed during a training session that didn’t solve anything.

During the first free practice, many people drove off the track, but only Albon did not avoid a collision with the barriers. This happened due to a common mistake that could easily be made. Entering the sixth corner, Alex attacked on a set of soft tyres, but failed to take into account that the track there was uneven, and when the car hit the curb at the exit of the corner, it suddenly became destabilized.

Albon is the best driver at Williams, last year the team was able to climb to 7th place in the Constructors’ Championship thanks to his efforts, but his accident in Melbourne left them in an extremely difficult situation. In such a situation, if Alex had played for another team, he would have been given a spare car by the second practice session and able to return to the track with minimal losses.

Williams was forced to make a difficult decision; according to James Vowles, this was the hardest decision he had ever had to make. I have no doubt that this was the case, but I think the team did the wrong thing when they gave Albon Logan Sargent’s car.

Vowles is a strategic thinker and his logic is clear, but the damage to Sargent and those working with them in the second half of the Williams garage was greater than the theoretical benefits.

Let’s first ask ourselves: was Albon really the better of the team’s two drivers last weekend? Logically that would be the case given the form he was in compared to Sargent last year. However, on Friday Alex missed a significant part of practice and Logan completed another 34 laps. Moreover, unlike his partner, Alex did not have time to simulate qualifying.

If, despite this, Vowles still believes Albon is stronger than Sargent, another question arises: if the team doesn’t trust Logan, why did they extend his contract for another season?

Perhaps it would have been better if Sargent had continued to drive his car in the hope of earning points, because this would have been a public confirmation that the team trusted him, and then all these questions would not have arisen, and the pride of the American. would not have been injured. It must have been very difficult for Logan to swallow all of this; After all, he wasn’t the one who crashed the car on Friday.

Albon also appeared to be unable to earn anything, although the cars of the three top teams did not reach the finish, Fernando Alonso received a 20-second time penalty and Valtteri Bottas lost even more time in the pits. If Alex had managed to reach the top ten on Sunday, then the decision to give him his partner’s car could probably be considered justified, but from my point of view this indicates the myopia of the team, which does not take into account the human factor.

There have been numerous arguments that gaining at least one point is crucial for the team, but last year one or two bonus points were not decisive for the allocation of places in the Constructors’ Championship.

For Albon, the Australian weekend also followed an abnormal scenario. He had to realize the full burden of his responsibility for the consequences of the accident and understand all the disadvantages of the team’s decision, because in modern Formula 1 there have never been such precedents, where one driver drove the car of another driver gets.

Alex was also under extra pressure because he couldn’t afford another accident, and Williams’ rivals understood this. Kevin Magnussen made risky overtaking actions, and that is completely in the style of the Danish Haas driver, but he also acted that way because he understood that Albon would be careful.

It’s a long season and Williams and Logan Sargent still have plenty of time to come back, but it must have been difficult for him to see his car being dismantled to get it ready for his teammate. Even when he made magnanimous speeches in public.

Now the need to prove his worth will be felt even more acutely. Moreover, it is not only the fans and the racing press who have to prove this, but also their own team.