Williams’ Alex Albon exclaimed he could have made the top three of Las Vegas Grand Prix qualifying had the event come earlier on in the 2023 Formula 1 season.
Albon and his rookie American team-mate Logan Sargeant both made the top-10 Q3 shootout for only the second time this season.
The Anglo-Thai racer posted the sixth fastest time with Sargeant seventh and both drivers will start a place higher in the race due to Carlos Sainz’s 10-place grid penalty.
Albon was always confident that the low-drag Williams FW45 would fare well down Vegas’ long straights, but such is the development rate of other teams compared to the lesser-funded outfit an even better result could have been obtained had Vegas come earlier in the year.
“If round eight was Vegas, we would be, it would be top three,” Albon remarked. “But yes, it is one of them tracks that was always gonna suit us efficiency-wise.
“It’s, I think it’s even more, [what do you call it] slippery than Monza and that proved it. You know, Logan also had an amazing qualifying session.
“I think the car’s been, the car’s been good. And, yeah, so it’s about now trying to finish the job tomorrow.”
Despite knowing Vegas would suit Williams, Albon admitted the pressure of delivering at a track that plays to the team’s strengths after a run of venues that didn’t was “a bit scary.”
“There’s a bit of expectation and pressure to deliver from everyone from the whole team and, and we’ve delivered that,” he said. “So, I’m very happy.”
The next challenge for Albon, Sargeant and Williams is to convert qualifying pace into race pace and the key to that will be managing any tyre graining in the cool conditions.
However, Albon is confident that if it can be overcome, overtaking others who have failed to mitigate graining will be easy.
“If there’s graining, anyone can be overtaken, when the graining comes in, the cars are going to be about a second to a half a lap slower and then you’re vulnerable to everyone,” said Albon.
“The trick is to not get the graining and that’s not that easy. So, we had quite bad graining on Friday.
“We did some set of changes today which, which maybe went against the qualifying car but, but focus more on the race car, hopefully that will help us.”
Williams Team Principal James Vowles was delighted with the performance of both of his drivers in qualifying and credited the whole team with a good performance.
“It was our dream before the weekend to get both cars into the top 10,” he expressed. “We managed that relatively easily in qualifying at the end.
“We’ve often had problems with overheating rear tyres this season. With 14 degrees Celsius here in Las Vegas, they were at just the right temperature.
“Our team did a great job here to ensure that [the] tyres stay in the right window. But I’m afraid we won’t look quite as strong in the race tomorrow.
Williams currently lies seventh in the Constructors’ standing on 28 points, seven ahead of AlphaTauri in eighth on 21 points.
A double top-10 grid slot, against AlphaTauri’s Q2 exit for Daniel Ricciardo (15th) and Q3 exit for Yuki Tsunoda (20th) means Williams has the chance to put distance between themselves and its rivals prior to the season finale in Abu Dhabi.
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