Alex Albon believes Williams have been “means too sluggish” in Qualifying on the Hungaroring, leaving him with an uphill battle after he bagged his worst beginning place since 2022.
The 29-year-old was eradicated in Q1 and can begin the Grand Prix from P20 simply behind Kick Sauber’s Nico Hulkenberg, whose effort was 0.142s away from Albon because the latter suffered from uncharacteristically poor one-lap tempo.
After a remarkably robust weekend last time out in Belgium that noticed him declare P5 in Qualifying, the Williams driver has struggled to match the efficiency of different midfield groups in Hungary, failing to interrupt into the top-10 all through observe.
However after their first flying laps, Albon and his group mate Carlos Sainz have been up in P15 and P16 earlier than they each bolted on a recent set of sentimental tyres. Whereas the Spaniard improved to P8, Albon might solely handle seventeenth earlier than he was bumped all the way down to final place by Pierre Gasly, Esteban Ocon and Hulkenberg.
Reflecting on what went fallacious after the session, he mentioned: “I believe primarily we simply didn’t account for the cooler monitor temperatures. We bought just a little bit sluggish on the out lap – means too sluggish, actually.
“I went into Flip 1 and the tyres have been too chilly after which it simply spiralled. Not very best however it might probably occur, and let’s see. Hopefully tomorrow we are able to do one thing.
“It’s tough to drive, however it’s not P20 tough. It’s been a kind of weekends to date the place we’ve simply been throwing stuff at it and nothing’s actually been working.
“We went again to the FP1 automotive for Qualifying simply to attempt to get again someplace the place I used to be happiest, which was in FP1. I do not know, possibly the monitor’s moved on since then.”
Sainz equally confirmed that they took a step again when it comes to the set-up on his automotive, however he was finally in a position to progress to Q2 and safe P13 on the grid, which however marked his third consecutive Q2 elimination.
“I believe we ended up reverting again on plenty of the set-up gadgets we tried in the course of the week,” he mentioned. “We went again to a automotive I do know and I roughly did the utmost that was out there to us at the moment with P13.
“It has been a really tough monitor for the Williams to date, however we knew that coming into right here and we simply must maximise no matter we have now.
“I believe we’re going to strive our greatest to get a degree or two however realistically talking, we don’t have the tempo to take action.”
