Toro Rosso’s Alexander Albon will only have the pre-season test to prepare for his debut F1 season in 2019 but seeing the grid, he is certain of ‘nice battles’.

With Brendon Hartley not able to register results as Red Bull and Toro Rosso would have liked, it became apparent they were looking for a replacement. The idea was to bring in Dan Ticktum but the British driver failed to gather enough superlicense points.

And so, they had to fall back on the plans they scrapped and get Albon in despite the Thai driver having a contract with Nissan to race in FIA Formula E Championship. After months of negotiations, Albon was finally released to join Toro Rosso for 2019.

A late call meant he couldn’t test in Abu Dhabi which now pushes his debut F1 run only in the pre-season testing in February at Barcelona – giving him only eight days to prepare for his maiden F1 season against the big guys.

One positive point for Albon is that he has raced against many of his rivals who will compete in F1 in 2019 – among them Lando Norris and George Russell are the most recent ones he has raced against.

He has even raced against Toro Rosso teammate Daniil Kvyat while among others, he has faced Charles Leclerc, Pierre Gasly, Lance Stroll and Antonio Giovinazzi in the junior single-seaters earlier in his career.

“The way the cars are designed in F1 make it hard to overtake, but with the rules for next year, I’m sure there will be some nice battles,” he said. “Quite a cool fact is that I raced with around half of the drivers on the grid from karting.

“So in some ways I think it will feel like battling like the old days. Personally, I don’t really set goals for the end of the year. It’s more about trying to maximize each race weekend as it comes.

“I won’t have many days in the car before Melbourne, so it will be very important to be as prepared as possible and take each race as it comes. Of course, it would be nice to fight regularly for points and at the sharp end.”

Albon will become the first Thai F1 racer since the 1950s which he is immensely proud of. But with the budget issues, the 22-year-old revealed he almost gave up racing when he was initially dropped from the Red Bull programme by Helmut Marko.

However, he fought back with better results and continued his fine run against some of the big names of today. “[It was] very tough [in 2012], it was a difficult year for me for numerous reasons, not least because of my results, but it made me work that much harder.

“I was on the brink of stopping racing all together. Since then, I knew I had to impress every time I drove and fortunately Dr. Marko gave me a second chance. I never gave up on it [F1], I needed to believe that it could still happen.

“Having said that, I knew that my chance of going to F1 was very slim as I didn’t have a proper budget. In reality, the only way I was going to have the opportunity was through Toro Rosso/Red Bull, but as we all know, it is not easy to impress Dr. Marko.”

Albon was relieved that the Nissan contract saga was over after months of talks and he was given the green signal to join Toro Rosso and realise his dream. He revealed the call from Marko came when he was buying a pair of trainers, the day after the end of the F2 season.

He was told the announcement will be made later on Monday – a day before the two-day Pirelli test in Abu Dhabi. He also revealed that the first call he made after the confirmation was to his mother.

Even though he couldn’t drive the car, Albon already started his behind the scenes work with the team during the two-day test in Abu Dhabi. He was seen in lengthy talks with different personnel from his team on both the days.

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR