Alex Albon gives damning Williams appraisal after Hungary F1 radio outburst

Alex Albon gave a damning verdict on Williams’ current pace at the Formula 1 Hungarian Grand Prix after a poor qualifying, noting that he was “having to drive it like a race lap”.

Neither Alex Albon nor team-mate Carlos Sainz was able to progress beyond Q1 on Saturday at the Hungaroring, as the team’s hopes of points for the first time since Monaco look slim.

Sainz narrowly beat Albon to 18th on the grid, with the latter sounding exasperated in a radio outburst at the end of Q1.

“Why is the balance changing so much,” he asked over the radio.

Team boss James Vowles responded: “Alex, it was a good lap considering the car is all over the place - that’s on us.”

“We don’t really understand”

Speaking to the media after qualifying, Albon said his FW40 was “just changing” every single lap, and noted that he couldn’t push for a genuine time attack.

“It’s hard to understand what the car is doing; it changes every lap, every corner,” he fumed.

“I think Carlos had some issues himself this weekend. I’ve had my own issues.

“I think we need to look into why the cars are… just changing; the feeling of the cars are just changing.

“It doesn’t feel… it feels like I’m not delivering any good laps because I go into every corner and I don’t know what the car is going to do.

“I’m kind of having to drive the car not like a qualifying lap; I’m having to drive it like a race lap, because if you push closer to a qualifying lap it will bite you, it will do something you don’t expect.

“It’s been frustrating.

“I think we don’t really understand it, and I think we’ve noticed more and more as the season has gone on that there are trends in the car that we don’t like, and we’re seeing differences. It’s tough.”

‘Aston has proven what we need to do going forward’

Sainz says Williams’ struggles in Hungary have not come as a surprise, while adding that Aston Martin’s ‘B-spec’ upgrades have shown “what we need to do moving forward”.

“When I saw the track map and the problems we’ve had this year, I knew it was going to be more difficult for us,” he said.

“Also the hotter temperature - everything is going against us this weekend.

“On top of that, on my side of the garage, a bit like in Spa, we spent FP1, FP2, FP3 with a lot of issues on the rear of the car that we couldn’t get rid of.

“By qualy we probably put some patches on the car that solved it, and then we did a better job, but still some serious things going on.

“Having said that, we knew this coming here.

“The good thing is Aston has proven to us that if you add downforce to the car, you go quicker. So, I think we know what we need to do moving forward.”