Williams team principal James Vowles feels Alex Albon delivered a “drive of champions” during the Canadian Grand Prix after being left “blind” throughout the entire race by a tyre sensor issue.
Albon scored Williams’ best result for almost two years by finishing seventh at Montréal’s Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, keeping at bay Alpine’s Esteban Ocon and Lando Norris in his McLaren over the closing laps, in an updated FW45.
The Thai-British driver’s performance is made all the more remarkable in that prior to the race an infrared sensor that delivers information on rear-tyre temperatures malfunctioned and was unable to be repaired in time.
After stopping on lap 12 under safety car conditions after George Russell smacked into a wall at Turn 9 in his Mercedes, Albon then drove for 58 laps on a set of hard tyres without any feedback on how the rear tyres were performing.
“You may have spotted on television we were taking bodywork off on Alex’s car just prior to the race,” said Vowles. ‘That’s never a comfortable position to be in.
“There was a problem, not one that would have affected reliability, but one that definitely did affect us on performance and data.
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“We have sensors that are pointing towards the rear tyres that tell us what’s going on. They’re IR (infrared) sensors, so they’re non-contact, but they give us basically infrared on what the tyre temperature is on the rear axle.
“They’re very, very useful to be able to understand in the race what we’re doing with the tyres, and especially when you’re trying to do what we did, which is a very long stint.
“You want to see how those tyres are performing; are you falling out of the window, do you need to put more energy in?
“Those were missing all race, which is just another testament to what Alex was really doing out there because he was, as we were, just blind on those tyre temperatures.
“He still had internal tyre temperatures, but the external was missing, and what we were trying to do on the grid is fix that in the short period of time that we had available, unfortunately, unsuccessfully.”
Despite that, Albon conjured his own best personal result since the final race of 2020 when he was with Red Bull.
Hailing Albon’s achievement, Vowles added: “At the beginning of the race, that safety car obviously changed things quite significantly, and it made it very difficult for a number of competitors, but also created an opportunity for us.
“We knew the life would just about be possible on that hard tyre from then onwards, and what we did, from that point on, was remain open-minded to converting to a two (stop), but the situation never really appeared for us to do so.
“Had there been another safety car, or VSC, you would have seen us stop again. That’s another circumstance we would have converted, and that one-stop would have been very difficult then.
“As it turns out, we were on the right strategy and Alex did really a tremendous job.
“The way I described it to him was really ‘a drive of champions’. Make no mistake, when you have a stack of cars behind you that are clearly much quicker, with your tyres going away from you, is an extraordinary drive and he did incredibly well with it.”
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