Alex Albon says ‘obvious’ Williams weakness traceable as far back as 2016

Alex Albon said it is time for Williams to take the “rolling pin” to their challenger with a main area of concern which dates back to 2016.

Williams have now finished P10 and last in four of the past five seasons, 2022 proving to be yet another setback after signs of recovery in the season before.

Scoring 23 points in 2021 and finishing P8, with a best result of P2 at a rained-off Belgium courtesy of George Russell, the team scored just eight in 2022 at the start of a new regulatory era.

And so looking ahead to the 2023 campaign, Albon said Williams “can’t leave any stone unturned” in their quest to eliminate the issues that are holding them back.

“My main thing really is you can’t leave any stone unturned,” Albon told media personnel, including PlanetF1.com, as he discussed Williams’ 2023 challenger.

“So the limitations are really clear, in terms of driver feedback, what the guys see in some of the GPS data where we’re losing in certain corners, it’s quite obvious the areas we need to work on. To achieve that though, is obviously another thing.

“I think it has been a characteristic in the car, previous to this year, talking 2017, 2016, there were already signs of this kind of balance, and so for us, there’s obviously a big focus on getting the rolling pin out and starting to smooth it out.

“So we’ve got to look in every area, you can’t put the blame on one side of the team, and we’ve really got to look at every little detail of performance and see if we can help the car and then look at correlation and see if everything’s going well.

“Because I do feel like our car has got some good characteristics in it, and at the same time, I definitely feel there are certain characteristics that are limiting us quite a lot.

“And if we could just get behind that we’ll make big steps forwards, not just by adding points of downforce, it’s by adding good balance and getting lap time and that’s where you see as I said before, this kind of characteristic side to our car.

“We seem to be very good at certain circuits, not very good in other circuits, and if we can find them traits and get the right traits in the car, which generally we all know what we need, we should be able to fight more consistently and also have a better platform to build on.

“Because once you get the through-the-corner balance right, in all the different speed types, that’s when you can really start to have that philosophy down and really start building on it.”

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