Of the hundreds of drivers who have graced the grid during Formula 1’s 76-year history, only 26 have completed a century of race starts with a single constructor. A new name is set to join the list this weekend at the Hungarian Grand Prix.
After breaking former world champion Nigel Mansell’s record last month to become the driver with the most race starts for Williams on 96, Alex Albon is on the verge of his second milestone of the season.
The now 30-year-old joined the British team in 2022, filling the void created by George Russell’s switch to Mercedes.
After Red Bull pulled him from a full-time race seat, making him its test and reserve driver instead, Albon had been on the F1 sidelines for a year. But that season away laid the foundation for the driver we see today — the leader of his team, and someone Patrick Harding, his performance coach, describes as a competitor who “wears his heart on his sleeve” but isn’t “insecure about who he is as a human being”.
“The proudest bit of working with him is seeing the individual he’s become now, compared to the challenges that he faced seven, eight years ago,” Harding, Albon’s coach of eight years, said in an interview. “You never want to be made a reserve driver, but the learnings that he had from that year at Red Bull, from both a technical and a human point of view, were absolutely integral to who he is as an individual.
“And if you ask me: would I change that? Probably not, because I don’t think we’d have the Alex Albon that we have right now.”
Five years ago, Albon stood at a crossroads.
Red Bull had replaced him with Sergio Pérez at the end of the 2020 season, after he had struggled to match teammate Max Verstappen’s pace.
While keeping one foot in F1 as the team’s reserve driver, he also competed in the Deutsche Tourenwagen Masters (DTM), a German sports car and touring car series, that season, finishing sixth in the drivers’ championship with a single win and multiple podium finishes across the 16 races.
But what was instrumental to Albon’s career was the time he spent during 2021 in the simulator and working with Simon Rennie, an engineer at Red Bull.
“Alex’s technical knowledge went up exponentially,” Harding said. “His understanding of the car, his understanding of the engineering side, what he needed from a car to be quick. It was unrecognizable in that first year at Williams compared to where he’d been that second year at Red Bull. So that was testament to the support he got at Red Bull.”
Red Bull replaced Alex Albon with Sergio Pérez at the end of the 2020 season. (Mark Thompson / Getty Images)
Harding also felt his year on the F1 sidelines challenged Albon to question who he was as a person. Over that time, he watched as Albon began focusing more on himself away from the track.
“One of the biggest challenges that young athletes have, and some established athletes as well, is separating themselves from their sport and that identity piece,” Harding said, “and that’s such a huge component of being successful. If you view yourself as what you do, then when you’re challenged on that, (it’s) very much an emotional response because you view that as a challenge to you as an individual.”
Around the same time, Russell was racing for Williams in 2020 but was heading to Mercedes for the following year. Albon recalled speaking with his fellow Brit, who joined F1 in 2019 with Albon and Lando Norris. “We would hide out behind the bins and talk about a possible chance back in Formula 1,” Albon said in an interview during last weekend’s Belgian Grand Prix.
He would ask Russell when he was making the move to Mercedes. The Williams seat is what Albon wanted, and it’s what he eventually secured.
And Russell did help, to an extent, by giving Albon a “warm welcome” to Williams and introducing him to people. He also gave him advice on areas the team needed to work on. “Just gave me a bit of a head start, so I could start my winter season already preparing for a team,” Albon said.
Williams not only offered Albon a fresh start, but also, potentially, a long-term career. At the time, it was competing among the teams at the back of the grid, finishing last with zero points in 2020 and eighth with 23 in 2021 (the year before he joined). In Albon, Williams now had a driver who had secured podium finishes and showed flashes of raw speed.
The potential was there.
It became a mutually beneficial move.
Coming into the 2022 season, though, Williams’ car was overweight and appeared among the slowest on the grid during preseason testing. It was the first year of the ground-effect regulation era, and the team was still getting to grips with the new rules.
So Albon’s Q2 appearance at the season-opening Bahrain Grand Prix and his P15 qualifying position stood out. Not only did he outqualify teammate Nicholas Latifi by a comfortable margin, he showed he could wring performance out of a tricky car.
He remembered having an “overwhelming emotion” in that moment, “a mixture of relief and excitement”. It set the tone for the next chapter.
“On the personal side, there were a lot of question marks about me coming back into Formula 1, and how was I going to do?” Albon said.
Williams looked to be the 10th fastest team, he added, but it was a car capable of squeezing into Q2 at times. “Sounds such a simple, boring story,” he continued, “but it meant a lot to me.”
Alex Albon finished 13th at the 2022 Bahrain Grand Prix. (Clive Mason / Getty Images)
Then he took seventh place at the 2023 Canadian Grand Prix. It wasn’t the first time Albon had been in the points for Williams but was his best finish yet in its car, and came at a pivotal time for the team. It had brought its first substantial upgrade of the season to that race in Montreal, creating a more competitive car. Albon described it as a “shift of momentum”.
“It seems funny to say, but that was such an insane result for us at the time,” he said. “I remember crossing the line, and my engineer, James, had the radio channel open, and you could hear the noise in the background of the whole team jumping up and down and celebrating, and that meant a lot to me.
“I remember hearing the team so excited, and obviously when we got back (to the UK), we had a huge celebration. And when I think about it back then, (it’s) sort of the beginning of the building blocks of where we started to grow as a team.”
Albon practically became the face of Williams’ resurgence.
He scored a majority of the team’s points for multiple seasons, sometimes outperforming the car’s potential, and earned the nickname ‘Tire Whisperer’ for his ability to save them and extend stint life.
The performances Albon put together on track also carried into behind-the-scenes meetings. He matured, which he said was the most significant development, and was now able to reset himself after a difficult session. He had figured out how to communicate what he wanted, understand relationships and help the team. That had a trickle-down effect.
“What I really loved about Alex when we came to Williams is seeing him step into the role as a leader,” Harding said. “He’s not somebody who’s going to scream and shout in engineering, or dictate to people what he wants from that respect. But he leads by example, and the standards that he sets for himself he expects from people around him.”
Reaching the century-mark with Williams has made Albon “feel old”, but it has also made him reflect on the progress made during those five seasons, going from a backmarker to a more competitive threat in the midfield last year.
This season has been difficult. Williams is eighth in the constructors’ championship and is struggling, just like at the start of 2022, with the new regulations.
“I feel the ups and downs. I feel the pain of this year just as much as anyone else,” Albon said. “It’s not out of frustration. I share the frustration. I share the frustration with the team. There’s no feeling sorry for myself. It’s all, ‘This is who we are, and this is where we need to improve and push forward to get back to where we were’.
“There’s a story there; where, in many ways, Williams were the ones that gave me my first opportunity back into Formula 1 and, at the same time, I live and breathe the team.
“I want this to go well. I poured a lot of my time and energy into this team, and I hope it’s for something.”
