After a turbulent Qualifying session at the F1 Canadian GP, marked by gusty winds and an evolving track, Williams‘ Alex Albon voiced frustration with how conditions impacted performance despite flashes of underlying pace.
Albon ultimately secured P12 on the grid but lamented a lack of progression through the sessions despite efforts to adapt.
“Frustrating,” Albon admitted in the print media pen when asked for his immediate reaction. “I think the wind picked up during qualifying, and we don’t like wind, so we subjectively go slower and slower as the qualifying goes on. I think I did the same lap time in Q1 to Q2 to Q3, tried the soft, tried the medium, tried different outlaps, and we were just going slower and slower.”
The Thai-British driver pointed to a core sensitivity in the FW47 that makes consistent performance elusive, especially in changing conditions.
“It shows some of the sensitivities in our car, which is frustrating,” he explained. “It’s really hard to get the lap together in qualifying. I felt quite happy with my job, but I feel like we kind of need the perfect situation sometimes. On Friday, the wind was low, it was favouring our car.
“We weren’t doing anything special with engine modes or weight, and we were quick. Even in qualifying, if you take my theoretical laps of all of them together, I would have been really quick.”
Working with new tyre compounds
When asked whether there’s anything the team can do setup-wise to better manage these conditions, Albon said the team is already trying to smooth out the car’s edges, but tyre behaviour remains a headache.
“We do, we do,” he said. “We try to keep the car as predictable as possible and give it a bit of a wider berth, not as peaky. It’s not just the car, it’s the tyres too, and we haven’t quite understood the C6 yet. Monaco we saw that, Imola we saw that.
“We’ve been seeing signs of us struggling a bit more on them tyre compounds. We see drivers being able to do out-push, and if we do that, we’re in the wall, so there’s something we need to understand.”
Despite the result, Albon’s pace in earlier sessions and his Q1 recovery after a red flag-causing bodywork failure suggest that Williams has more to offer at the Canadian GP. But to unlock it, the team will need the conditions and execution to line up perfectly.
