Alexander Albon says the Williams F1 car had a bit of a personality in 2023 where it had very particular likes and dislikes.
Even at the onset of the 2023 F1 season, it was known that the Williams car will be a bit of handful. There has been a bit of a trend for the car to excel on the straightline which helps in qualifying and also to defend from cars having similar pace.
Of course, it then makes the car to be only good on circuits having long straights and less corners. This was proven too in 2023 as the car did well on circuits having those characteristics and struggled in corners which limited their results.
This is something that Albon wants Williams to eradicate in 2024 and a thing which they have been working on in 2023. “We have spent a lot of time this year figuring that out because the more we can figure that out, it will help us next year,” he said.
“What’s obvious for us is that our car is very…it has a big personality in some ways, it has one way that you need to drive it and at the same time there are corners that suit us, there are corners that don’t suit us, the peakiness of the car is pretty extreme in some places, like I’ll give you an example like Las Vegas, we ran pretty aggressive rim heating to get the tyres to work for track temperatures, it what gave us great result of P5 and P6 in qualifying, our car was not P5 and P6 on paper, it was maybe P9 and P10 and likely we comprised too much for the Sunday car on Saturday.
“We went into Sunday and within three laps we were overheating the tyre. That’s where you see so many elements it can happen, generally, on Sunday we are quite consistent, I think Vegas maybe not really an example like others. If you look at, lets say Brazil when compared to Monza, it is exactly these kind of issues that we want to fix for next year.
“There are corners in Brazil, there’s maybe four of them that we are losing tenth and a half in each corner and we can’t get around them, we can’t stop front-locking, we can’t stop understeer off the track. And then at the same time, in Monza we don’t really have a limitation, it doesn’t seem to hurt us, there’s a lot of straightline, you don’t need to combine too much and that’s where you see peaks because our car has good qualities and bad qualities.
“Our job next year is to get rid of them as much we can, that’s been in the car for last 5-6 years and hopefully next year we can finally make some inroads to it. But being honest with you, car characteristics from last year to this year, didn’t really change that much, it is just we added more downforce,” summed up Albon.
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