Alexander Albon says Williams were fortunate eventually after being dependent on Yuki Tsunoda in the F1 Abu Dhabi GP battle.
Already in qualifying, Williams were behind AlphaTauri in F1 Abu Dhabi GP which posed certain amount of danger for the Grove-based team, even though they had seven points buffer. Tsunoda looked strong all-weekend and had the chance to score well.
He even led the race at point which raised tensions as Albon and even Logan Sargeant struggled and had limited chance to score. The Thai racer noted about being helpless in the situation since Tsunoda was so far up the road with strong pace.
But both Albon and Williams breathed a sigh of relief when the one-stop for Tsunoda didn’t work and other faster cars managed to clear him. The Thai racer, though, was not happy how the wind affected their car early on and strong pace at the end didn’t matter.
“Straight into wheel spin and then went into more wheel spin and then really struggled in the beginning of a stint,” said Albon. :The increased wind direction on race day also exposed a weakness of Williams’ FW45 package, which Albon also credits for negatively impacting his race prospects
“The wind was quite high, you know, in the first 20 laps of the race and it’s amazing how it frustrates our car. It makes it so much harder to drive so much more disconnected and then the wind died down and we changed tyres and then the car came alive and especially the final stint we were very strong.
“But that’s kind of the sensitivities of our car. I feel like if we didn’t have that first stint, we could have been fighting for points. Regardless, it was a tough race where we were just dependent on Yuki. Unfortunately, Yuki was too fast, so we could not have any involvement in his race because he was up the road from us. But fortunately for us, some of the quicker cars got past him so happy to cement that P7,” summed up Albon
Here’s Yuki Tsunoda on missing out
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