Williams team principal James Vowles believes Alex Albon is underlining his leadership qualities now he has a car beneath him from which he can extract performances and results.
Following an upgrade on the car for the Canadian Grand Prix, the FW45 has been transformed, and with it Albon’s form as the Thai-British driver finished seventh at Montreal’s Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, his best result in F1 since the end of 2020.
Although Albon was just out of the points at the following race in Austria, he was one of the stars of the show over the British GP weekend from which he came away with an eighth-place finish.
No longer the driver ditched by Red Bull at the end of 2020, Albon has found a new lease of life with Williams, and is reaping the reward of the faith placed in him by Vowles following the latter’s arrival from Mercedes earlier this year.
“Across the season I’ve known him, he’s matured,” said Vowles.
“He’s still young in many senses, but across the season, I think he’s grown and grown in terms of his confidence, in what he’s doing, how he’s achieving it, and he is becoming more and more a leader of the organisation.
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“He and I have a good relationship together. I’m honest and truthful – as I am with the public as well – about where’s good, where’s bad, and where we need to move forward.
“The difference is now when you say to him ‘That was an incredible drive, you did a good job’, it has a meaning and a bearing.”
At Silverstone, the car displayed considerable pace, aided by the nature of the circuit that played to its strengths.
For the Hungarian Grand Prix, the tight, twisty nature of the Hungaroring is expected to prove particularly detrimental to the Williams.
But from Vowles’ perspective, the results from Canada and Britain are helping to transform the team as a whole, and not just Albon, in particular, with Williams sitting a healthy seventh in the constructors’ standings, and on merit.
“I’ll use body language to describe things,” said Vowles. “I’ll ask you to have a look at the team and see if shoulders are up, heads high. Are you seeing that physically it’s transforming the team in the right direction? I’d argue, yes.
“It’s more important that these points are not being achieved by luck, and I think that’s a fair reflection on the fact we’ve moved forward. We’re starting to chip away at it.
“That’s important for the team because it has had quite a few years of a pretty hard time, and any team like that, you need to have a positive momentum moving forward in order to generate the workflow to go further again.
“And I’m not interested in being seventh in the championship, I’m interested in being far higher than that, and that’s achieved by building on this at the moment.”
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