Formula 1’s 2023 edition was Williams’ best result since 2017, as the team finished 7th in the Constructor’s Championship. At the season’s end, Williams Racing earned a total of 28 points, with the majority points (27) being delivered by Alex Albon, and the barrier-crashing Logan Sergeant bringing just 1 point.
Despite their best result in 6 years, the Thai-British driver Alex Albon had a ‘negative’ outlook on his last season’s F1 car—the Williams FW45.
Alex Albon talks on Williams FW45
In a recent interview, Williams’ driver Alex Albon shared his comprehensive analysis of the challenges he faced last season, specifically focusing on the performance oddities of the Willams FW45 car.
Talking about the FW45, Albon stated, “I don’t want to speak too soon, but the FW45 always had some consistent limitations with the car, especially when we went to tracks like Monaco or Barcelona.”
“Low speed [corners] and braking were always big issues for us, but also high-speed long corners were difficult as well,” he added in detail.
On Willams’ plan with the newly revealed FW46, Albon added, “This year especially, we’ve sacrificed a little bit of development time on the FW45 to focus on the FW46, shorten the amount of upgrades we had on the car, to make sure that we tried to attack this car a little bit more aggressively and really starts to change the DNA of the car. That’s the plan. Let’s see if it happens.”
Alex Albon also suggested that the FW45’s weakness wasn’t just solely his observation. “It’s not just my feedback, it’s every teammate, even 2020 and 2021 when I wasn’t even driving the car, it had the same issues, so there has always been an inherent issue with the Williams cars in the last four or five years,” he told.
Albon will hope that Williams rectifies the long-standing issues with the car’s DNA, something that even their former driver George Russell complained about.
George Russell previously criticized Williams engine
Ex-Williams driver George Russell—who currently drivers for Mercedes—also previously criticized the Willams F1 car, back in 2019 after the Australian Grand Prix. During the interview, he pointed out that the car has a ‘fundamental’ problem. He hinted that the problem was engine-related as solving it could ‘unlock some good speed’.
“There is one fundamental [weakness] which I don’t want to discuss publicly,” said Russell. “We understand what that is, but it doesn’t mean we can wake up one morning and rectify it. To change something so fundamental will take months of development, work in the simulator and designers working out how to do it, and that’s what needs to be done at the moment.”
Hoping to solve the ‘fundamental’ issue, Russell said, “Once we’ve solved that fundamental [weakness] there’ll be a big leap, we’ll probably still be at the back of the grid but with a chance to fight. At the moment we don’t really have any hope because we’re too far behind.”
Fast forward to 2024—right before the start of a new season—it seems that Williams Racing has yet to fully address this issue, and they continue to lag behind their competitors.
Can Alex Albon and Williams take a shot at the F1 title with the FW46? Or will it have similar problems like the FW45? Let us know your predictions in the comments section below.
