How unshackled Albon is taking inspiration from Hamilton and Vettel

“I’m not young anymore. You just get to that point where you have to do a duty…”

Alex Albon is musing over his motivation to become a charity patron – the reason for that red barnet he’s been sporting since the Australian Grand Prix – but GP Racing feels compelled to intercede and remind him that, at 26, he’s hardly ‘not young’.

“It’s not old,” he laughs, “but it’s scary!”

While not quite one of the grandees of the grid, having just two full seasons of Formula 1 race experience in the bank, Albon has certainly had what reality TV types like to describe as ‘a journey’. He hasn’t quite cut ties with the Red Bull organisation which demoted him to a test-and-reserve role 16 months after promoting him from its junior team (“I have a relationship… but not in terms of, say, a contract this year”).

But just seven months into his second F1 coming he seems much more his own man than he was before, more willing to venture an opinion – or, indeed, dye his hair red and use his profile to raise funds for disadvantaged children in Thailand. It’s a big step for a driver who has described himself as “not an extrovert”.

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“It’s been great,” Albon says. “It’s one thing which, when you start your F1 career, you don’t really think about it too much. Then you realise that we’re recognised around the world, and we have a presence – a following. When I entered F1, I didn’t really know what to do with it. You’re living it; you’re not really thinking about anything else.

Albon has taken on the lead driver role at Williams with success after spending last year on the sidelines

Photo by: Williams F1

“But as time has gone by I’ve felt like it’s a great way to try and do something, to use – I don’t know, call it fame – to do good. And so I’ve started charity work. Of course, I have a strong connection to Thailand [his mother is Thai and he races under a Thai licence], and trying to help people in Thailand – I think it’s been really successful in the way that the red hair has come in [setting off a paddock craze], and in some respects got way more attention than I thought it would.

“This whole thing’s for an orphanage, we’ve built a sports hall there now and we’re moving on to other things because it’s been so successful.”

Albon’s new boss, Williams team principal Jost Capito, describes him as “a very smart guy” – high praise indeed from a manager who has worked with world rally champions Marcus Gronholm and Sebastien Ogier.

Albon may be able to keep up the good work for a long time to come, for he has slipped neatly into a role vacated at the start of the year by George Russell, with all the expectation that entails

While Albon made a relatively inauspicious off-track start with Williams – losing his car keys down the back of a sofa on his first day in the simulator – he’s subsequently impressed the team with his focus, feedback and speed. Capito has also enthused about how Albon turned that year on the sidelines at Red Bull to his advantage, using that slightly removed perspective to learn how a driver’s behaviour and communication affects the entire team’s ability to maximise performance.

It was through Capito that Albon found his charity vocation. Capito’s younger brother Volker runs an event-management company from his adopted home of Bangkok and has been supporting the Wat Sa Kaeo orphanage for nearly two decades via his Iceman charity (the children nicknamed him ‘Iceman’ after an early donation of 2,500 ice creams). Jost makes a personal donation for every point Williams scores.

En route to Australia this year, Albon visited the orphanage, played football with the kids, let them dye his hair red – considered an auspicious colour in Asia – and decided to become a patron.

“There are some drivers out there, Sebastian [Vettel] and Lewis [Hamilton] are the key ones, you can see their activism and what they’re doing outside the paddock,” Albon says. “They’re doing a lot of good, trying to improve people’s lives… This is an opportunity for me to do the right thing.”

Albon has been inspired by Vettel and Hamilton to use his platform for the betterment of others

Photo by: Williams

Albon may be able to keep up the good work for a long time to come, for he has slipped neatly into a role vacated at the start of the year by George Russell, with all the expectation that entails. Although Albon hasn’t yet ascended some of the on-track peaks attained by Russell, particularly in qualifying, much of that can be accounted for by a conscious decision on the part of the engineering team to rebalance car performance towards race pace.

Some of Albon’s most impressive drives this season have been from humdrum grid positions into or near the points, such as in Melbourne, where he made one set of tyres last almost the entire race distance to claim 10th after starting last. Similarly impressive, given the track and conditions, was 11th at Imola after his car self-destructed in qualifying. Still, qualifying remains an area which needs work, for it was that which set him back at Red Bull.

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“On reflection, my first year in F1 [in which he was promoted from Toro Rosso to Red Bull mid-season, replacing Pierre Gasly] was great, and my second year [in which he was dropped in favour of Sergio Perez after scoring just two podiums] obviously didn’t go to plan,” says Albon.

“But, looking back, I think it got very overdramatised as to this kind of underperforming thing, and I think people forget that it was difficult for Max [Verstappen] too. We weren’t [right] up at the front, and to be two or three or four tenths off would put you right in the danger zone.”

Racing driver excuses could fill several encyclopaedias but there’s substance to this claim. Red Bull’s RB15 and RB16 were flighty cars flattered by Verstappen’s reflexive virtuosity and both required substantial in-season development. Albon’s successor, Perez, similarly struggled in the RB16B last season but has found the latest generation of cars much more suited to his skill set.

“I was disappointed with my year [in 2020],” says Albon. “But at the same time I thought I only needed to fix a few things and I knew I could address those. And a lot of it was just confidence with the car – it was really tricky to drive. And it was almost this feeling like it was driving me rather than I was driving it.

“The hardest thing about taking a year away is it’s not like you’re a footballer who can put on some boots and spend hours on a training ground – I was in the [F1] simulator with the team, but driving a GT3 car. But I did feel like there were a lot of areas I could improve on.

Albon was disappointed with his season at Red Bull in 2020

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

“Relationships with the engineer, understanding, learning about tyres, one-lap pace, how you get into that kind of military precision on the performance side – I looked at all of it during my year away, and I had a solution, or a fix, in my eyes. I feel like I entered this year miles more experienced, more knowledgeable, more confident. I’m managing everything better.”

And it’s not the case that in swapping a frontline team for one trying to re-establish itself, Albon will be under less pressure. There will always be comparisons with Russell, though more from without than within Williams it seems.

"It’s truly a make-or-break year in some respects, you know, being given an amazing chance by Williams. There’s still a lot of pressure to perform" Alex Albon

“People think the pressure goes off because you’re coming from a big team to a smaller team and you’re not in the spotlight as much,” says Albon. “I kind of understand where people come from, but at the same time it’s truly a make-or-break year in some respects, you know, being given an amazing chance by Williams. There’s still a lot of pressure to perform.

“You have to get rid of the noise and focus on the job. And that’s what works for me.”

It’s working so far – you might even say the dye is cast…

Albon has made a solid start at Williams with some impressive drives like in Melbourne, as he hopes to kick on for the rest of 2022

Photo by: Williams F1