Alex Albon was left elated with a substantial points haul after finishing sixth in the Belgian Grand Prix, the Thai driver holding off Ferrari’s Lewis Hamilton for much of the race in Spa.
However, it was mixed fortunes for Williams with Carlos Sainz unable to finish in the points despite doing so in the Sprint, instead having to settle for P18 at the end of a difficult day that began in the pit lane.
Albon was the Williams man to struggle in the Sprint, coming home a lowly 16th, but a strong Qualifying on Saturday afternoon saw him bag fifth on the grid, and while he lost a place to George Russell in the wet early on, Albon made it to the line in an impressive P6.
He also managed to keep a charging Hamilton behind for a big chunk of the race, despite the Ferrari man having DRS for lap after lap, and a car that looked strong in race trim. Sixth was Albon’s best finish since Imola, so it was no surprise that he was left delighted with how his afternoon went.
“Very happy, it was not easy to hold off Lewis [Hamilton] and he gave me a lot of pressure for long parts of the race,” Albon explained.
“In some ways, a bit annoyed to have given a position up to George [Russell] but to be honest with you, I think we struggled a bit more in the wet than we do in the dry. Once we put the dry tyres on we were okay.
“I’m happy, I think we finished 12 seconds or so in front of the next midfield car which is a good statement of intent from us and shows our package was working well this weekend, so very happy.”
Albon has now scored points in nine of the 10 races he has finished this year – as well as putting to be a torrid run where he failed to finish in three consecutive races in Spain, Canada and Austria.
“It shows I think realistically that if we had finished every race, we would have scored points I think in nearly every race and that’s a really good trait to have,” he continued.
“It means the DNA of the car is consistent and we are not peaking. I think we are the most consistent midfield team, and we can go to every weekend knowing we can score points as long as we can finish the race.”
Williams remain fifth in the standings, with a healthier margin to the rest of the midfield thanks to the points earned in Belgium. But despite that, the weekend proved a bittersweet one for Sainz, who did so well to score in the Sprint but had a race to forget on Sunday.
The Spaniard opted for a pit lane start after taking on some new power unit components, but despite starting ahead of Hamilton in the pit lane – the Ferrari man finishing seventh in the end – Sainz could only come home in P18 on a day where everything went wrong.
“Basically, our weekend was run after a bad Quali yesterday,” Sainz said. “We did a bit of analysis after the bad Qualifying and we saw that we went in the wrong direction with the set-up, that probably cost me quite a bit in Quali.
“We also found an anomaly in the car throughout the weekend, so we said ‘okay we are starting 15th, better we start 17th from the pit lane than 15th on the grid’.
“That allows us to change the anomaly, that allows us to change the set-up, that allows us to put a high downforce rear wing for the wet, as it looked like it was going to be wet. It wasn’t wet, and we couldn’t move forward.”
Sainz was not the only driver to gamble on a set-up that didn’t prove optimal, on a day where the weather was incredibly difficult to predict. But that aside, the Spaniard remains frustrated with his up and down season, where every step forward seems to follow with another step backwards.
“I don’t know if it is a matter of time, or I’m going to start to consider changing something bigger, to see if there is something that starts clicking a bit more,” he added.
“We had a super strong Sprint, a super strong Qualifying for the Sprint, super strong lap in Q1 and then suddenly we don’t manage to improve and the weekend started to go south.
“I don’t know, it is something I need to keep looking at, something I need to keep working on. Every weekend is a different thing so it is not like it is a pattern and, yeah, we are going to keep working hard at it and see what we can do in Hungary.”
