Alex Albon best grid position at Belgian Grand Prix resulted because of a “cheap upgrade”. The Williams F1 team believes the best grid position for him is resulted because of that upgrade.
The Thai driver made to the ninth place in qualifying at Belgian Grand Prix. He marked the fastest first sector among all. The driver finished sixth and 10th spot for Q1 and Q2 respectively.
Albon managed to find himself in sixth place at the starting grid of the Spa Grand Prix. It was only possible because of Max Verstappen, pacesetter at Spa qualifying, his title rival from Ferrari, Charles Leclerc, and Esteban Ocon’s grid penalties.
It helped the Thai-Brit driver to mark the best place for himself at the Williams. He managed the fourth grid slot in 2020 at Austrian, Tuscany, Turkey, and Bahrain GPs for his ex-team Toro Rosso.
Dave Robson, Williams head of performance, revealed that FW44 was equipped with circuit specific “cheap” upgrade. He claims that helped the car to maintain its efficiency at the Spa.
The weather also played its role as the new car showed sensitivity to the wing. FW44 struggled with the weather at Hungarian qualifying laps for both Albon and his team mate Nicholas Latifi.
Robson said: “We’ve gone for a relatively cheap upgrade, in that we’ve just cut the back end off the rear wing, but that’s actually worked pretty well.
“[It has] maintained a very good level of efficiency for that drag level.
“I think the other thing here is the wind level is low, so the car is behaving well and consistently, which helps.
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“As we lower the downforce level, the fact you’ve still got that consistency is useful.
“At least the drivers generally know what they’re going to get at each corner. So, the effective efficiency is good.”
During Q2 and Q3 Albon was unable to pull the perfect laps. Mistake free laps would have helped him fetch the seventh place on grid with ideal lap time.
However, inconsistent performance was associated to “nothing to lose” as he knew he would start no lower than ninth place.
Albon reckoned that the Spa has helped them hide the shortcomings of his car.
He said: “We know the weaknesses of our car. This track hides them a little bit more than other circuits. So [Zandvoort, next race] is not going to be as smiley as this week.
“We know our car likes low downforce and, when track conditions are in a place that suits us, we can extract a good lap time out of the car.”
