Alexander Albon wants Williams to find a good balance between its high downforce and low downforce package, so that it can score some points in F1 standings fight.
As Carlos Sainz noted about the struggles of Williams on tracks like Bracelona and Hungary, Albon concurred with most part while talking about the issues on high downforce and low downforce packages. It is evident that they do well on tracks requiring the latter.
On the high downforce tracks, they just need to find the balance to salvage as much they can and recover the maximum when competing in low downforce circuits. For short-term, they need to figure this out, considering their rivals have closed up with Aston Martin only 18 points behind.
Even Sauber sits 19 points behind and both have looked good in terms of balance between two types of circuits. Albon feels Williams needs to score high on low downforce tracks like their rivals have managed to utilise on their set of advantageous circuits, otherwise it will be down to ‘holding’ fort for them.
“When I look at us on the high downforce rear wing, we don’t seem to be able to get the balance that we get on the medium in low speed,” said Albon to media. “It is not like previous years where we have been good on the low downforce, it is just we don’t have the balance at the moment with high downforce car, we need to improve that…so it is going to be a bit of a fight now to the end of the year.
“I think the Aston and the RB showed no deg whole race in Hungary, it is going to be one of those years, I think we have to try and hold on now to the end of the year, we might be more suited to the low downforce tracks, they will be suited more to the high downforce tracks, we are going to each race scrapping either. So, yeah, we need to figure out these type of weekends, didn’t feel at all.
“Whenever we can run the low downforce rear wings, I think we go into…I still think we can score good points for the rest of the year. We just understand if we can get a better balance around these high configuration tracks and if we can, we are the team that we need to be up there as well, so we do need to tidy up and improve when you come to these type of circuits,” summed up Albon.
In terms of qualifying, he doesn’t thinks Williams is as bad. He agrees that the tyres seems to be a bit of ‘black magic’, especially how the C5 and C6 performs differently for different teams/drivers and at different circuits thus far. In Hungary, it was not a lot about the tyres in qualifying.
“No, our qualifying seems to be fine, look who qualified on pole, Charles,” continued Albon. “Look where Max was, I would argue that McLaren were nowhere near where they should be. We saw big differences between some drivers…when you have a qualifying session like you had in Hungary, it is not with the tyres.
“It is lot of teams up and down the grid, teammates and teammates having to…we have seen the C5 and C6, they are more black magic tyre, they are not easy to understand and it was much harder for us to switch on, it looks like. If we the Astons, they came alive in Hungary, I think they qualified P19 and P20 in Spa and now they are [in Top 10]. It is so difficult to know. Yeah, it is difficult for everyone.”
Here’s Carlos Sainz on what Williams needs to do