Why Albon won't be "throwing around laptops" to gain a 2023 F1 edge

“I hope not, they come out of the cost cap!”

Williams’s head of vehicle dynamics, Dave Robson, was relieved to hear Alex Albon has no plans to be “throwing laptops around” as part of his work with the Formula 1 team in 2023.

That is set to be one of the storylines to follow in the coming campaign – can Albon galvanise a squad that lost its previous upward momentum with a tricky start to the new ground-effects era? At the same time, there’s an expectation he must be even better alone behind the wheel too.

Albon stands rather uniquely amongst his F1 peers. His generation comprises his karting and junior formula rivals Charles Leclerc, George Russell, Lando Norris and Pierre Gasly, extended to the longer-established Max Verstappen, Carlos Sainz and Esteban Ocon too. But of that first group, mainly his rivals in GP3 and Formula 2, Albon has had far tougher career roadblocks to navigate just getting to this point in time.

Having gone through all the well-known struggles with funding and dropping off two junior programmes, Albon felt the distinctive pain of not just the Red Bull axe from its top team, but tumbling off the grid altogether as a result.

His re-hiring at Williams in 2022 was a wonderful reprieve – and one Albon grabbed brilliantly and decisively to earn a long-term contract with the Grove-based team, which revealed its 2023 livery on an FW44 on Monday. A week on, the FW45 will be running at a Silverstone shakedown, where Albon’s helmet will be minus Red Bull’s branding for the first time since 2018 – his departure from its roster now official in this new year.

The Red Bull drop when Sergio Perez came aboard as Verstappen’s latest team-mate for 2021 focused and spurred Albon on as he watched from the sidelines. The pressure to get a new Williams deal from 2023 onwards amped up the pressure last year, familiar to Albon from his similar circumstances alongside Verstappen in 2020, but second time around he delivered. And yet that drop still represents something of a problem.

Albon fared well against Russell and Norris in F2 in 2018, but has had plenty of hurdles to face at the pinnacle of motorsport

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

F1 drivers themselves talk of a ‘third year step’ where, settled and familiar in the pressure-heavy context of the championship, the best kick on to reach new heights. Norris and Russell recently did it at McLaren and Williams respectively. Verstappen and Leclerc did it even quicker.

Albon’s third F1 season followed his Red Bull demotion and contained his efforts to get up to speed with a new team, alongside the challenges of learning the latest ground-effects cars. That's a small difference to many of his fellows, but a resource drain nevertheless. This, in turn, alters an assessment of Albon’s year three progress.

“I feel like I'm at my peak,” says Albon, who reckons he’s now at a higher fitness level than 12 months ago after overcoming the impact of his appendicitis surgery and terrifying subsequent respiratory failure at the 2022 Monza race that lasted until the end of last year. “I feel like I'm driving better than I have done previously.”

"The way I go about our business is more to get the best out of the people I work with. I don't think that's necessarily always just being hard on people" Alex Albon

Right now, there’s another interesting comparison element to Albon’s final year racing for Red Bull in 2020 – that he’s again had off-season squad stability compared to the team or series changes that regularly featured in his junior career. This time, however, he’s “more settled, more comfortable” at Williams, the difference coming down to not having “a [one] year contract” and 2020 not being “the easiest year for me” alongside Verstappen.

That’s a key part of the story for Albon – who possesses stunning qualifying speed and soaked up pressure to deliver shock results for Williams last year, such as his Melbourne point with a penultimate lap stop. The narrative is that to really thrive in F1, he must be more forthright, direct – play the game a bit more selfishly. After all, the championship’s history is stuffed with ruthless operators succeeding.

PLUS: The five best race drives of F1 2022

That perception stems from his Red Bull/Toro Rosso rehiring ahead of 2019 and his F1 bow. From people such as the sadly departed Jean-Paul Driot, who, once he’d got past the anger stemming from Albon being plucked from his Nissan e.dams Formula E squad in late 2018, felt his former F2 driver would need to operate more cannily in the politically charged Red Bull world to survive it, let alone prosper. Many felt that not doing so contributed to Albon’s ejection from Red Bull.

But that tale has carried on with his Williams resurgence too, particularly after comments made by former team technical director Francois-Xavier Demaison late last year. The thought was that Albon is "too nice" to become world champion, and that he needed to "be a bit more hard" and demanding with Williams in order to get its package securing glittering results. 

“It is a tricky one,” Albon says, reflecting on a perception he knows many people are familiar with from their own lives, hence the added interested in the F1 spotlight.

Does Albon need to be harder on his colleagues? The man himself isn't so sure

Photo by: Williams

“I would say the way I go about our business is more to get the best out of the people I work with. I don't think that's necessarily always just being hard on people. I think everyone works differently. And it's about extracting performance in different ways. Everyone has different personalities. I'm definitely focused on becoming more of a team leader, and looking at ways to do that. That's not necessarily just throwing laptops around!”

Robson, who worked with world champions Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button at McLaren before joining Williams, disagrees with the narrative surrounding Albon.

“I think he gets the balance about right,” he explains. “If you listen to him on the radio, when he is actually out on the track, he’s not shy about telling us what he thinks. The moment he steps out of the car, he’s quite a different character in terms of the way he speaks and sounding much calmer. But what he’s asking for is still just the same.

“So, there’s a sort of emotional switch there that’s on or off depending on whether he’s got his helmet on or not. I think he gets the balance about right. It did change and improve over the course of [2022], but he’s demanding – don’t worry about that. He knows what he wants and he’s not shy to ask for it. So, I don’t think there’s a big problem there.

“What he needs is being pushed on, which we hope Logan [Sargeant] will do.”

As the established driver alongside a rookie team-mate, Albon needs to step up regardless of his story circumstances. Sargeant, 22, has been hired in part to be closer to Albon than Nicholas Latifi and in turn force him to raise his game further, but will also have to become acquainted with a brand new world in F1.

Judging by his easy-going, considered answers to the media on Monday, confidence won’t be a problem for the American Formula 2 race winner and former Williams academy member. But that might take a hit if early results aren’t great, which would in turn increase expectations on Albon to deliver the points Williams needs.

He's taken promising early steps – such as calling Russell for a chat about working with soon-to-be-arriving Williams team principal James Vowles, drawing on the resources of their friendship. Plus, Albon gathered his support team (including his trainer and manager) over the winter to define ‘leading’ as a quality he wants to instil in the coming campaign as part of his ongoing drive to improve.

PLUS: Why the new Williams boss shouldn’t avoid ‘Mercedes B-team’ comparisons

With a rookie team-mate alongside in Sargeant, more of the onus will be on Albon to pick up points for Williams

Photo by: Williams

Albon isn’t expecting Williams’s 2023 to start “something like a Haas” last year and “come out of the box and straight away are very competitive”. The team has focused on fixing the slow-speed front locking issue that impacted the FW44’s handling, which never had a consistent balance for Albon and former team-mate Latifi. This in turn fed into the inconsistent feel they had for getting the best out of the fickle tyres in both qualifying and race trim.

PLUS: Who were the fastest drivers in F1 2022?

But Albon is wise to underplay expectations – although it’d be tricky to do anything else given Williams finished last in the 2022 constructors’ standings and Autosport’s supertimes calculation of overall car pace too, both by big margins. At the same time, here he’s already demonstrating the qualities Williams needs – an honest and calm leader, focused on what really matters behind the scenes.

He can rely on the security provided by his long-term contract to avoid his previous F1 career pitfalls, while also building on the progress he made back at the top level last year, which was instilled by the pain and opportunity of his Red Bull demotion

But one centre-stage issue demonstrated Albon’s nature best at Williams’ 2023 livery launch. He spoke eloquently and coolly on the clampdown the FIA has imposed on driver expression this year via a new revision to its International Sporting Code. His comment that “we were very much for ‘We Race As One’ and all these kind of situations, and it seems like the FIA are trying to go away from that” is quietly very damning for the governing body.

PLUS: One easy way the FIA could instantly improve F1

Along with his now fully blonde style, this perhaps best represents who Albon is – a gentle character, but an engaging one too. The problem is that even in the current era, the most successful drivers and team managers combine the carrot and stick approach.

Just look at Russell, with his season two Drive to Survive debrief fulminating at the 2019 British Grand Prix providing a visual demonstration of how hard he could be on Williams’s engineers and that played a part in his subsequent success there.

This then seems to be how things are set for Albon in 2023: that he can rely on the security provided by his long-term contract to avoid his previous F1 career pitfalls, while also building on the progress he made back at the top level last year, which was instilled by the pain and opportunity of his Red Bull demotion.

If the delayed 'third year' step comes, as many expect it will, he'll do it in his own wonderful style.

Can Albon make his delayed 'third year' step in 2022 and put past disruptions behind him?

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images