Albon: The car’s behaviour has become less extreme

Things are clearly worse for Williams this season than a year ago. After 14 stages, the team had 21 points and was in 7th place in the Constructors’ Championship. However, Alex Albon, the lead driver, is confident that there are positive aspects: the FW46 car is generally more stable on the circuits than its predecessor. Of course, this chassis also has its shortcomings, but the team is working on eliminating them.

“Although some of the extremes in the car’s behaviour are much less visible, there is still a certain similarity with last season,” says Albon. – We compared our impressions of the FW46 with last year’s comments, and they are somewhat echoed. Its behaviour has simply become less extreme.

But if last year we had very serious problems in slow corners for example, this year the car can handle them quite well. The race in Monaco was proof of that (where Alex earned points for 9th place).

But on some circuits there are only two or three corners where we lose too much time. There are also problems in high-speed corners – that’s why we had such problems in Barcelona.

At the same time, the team has managed to significantly reduce the weight of the car: although it is still excessive, it is not as much as at the beginning of the year.”

We recently quoted the words of James Vowles, head of Williams Racing, who explained that the overweight chassis is a result of the reforms the team is implementing during its turnaround period:

“This year we have again dropped to 9th place in the Constructors’ Championship, but do we really need to be there? No, if the weight of our car did not exceed the established minimum limit, but we created these difficulties for ourselves when we implemented technological reforms.

“I want the team to create a car that can handle all tracks well, and we have already laid a good foundation for that. In the short term, there was a price to pay for that, but we will make up for it in the future.”