Alex Albon has expressed that he is prepared to encounter “short-term” pain at Williams as the team continues on its long-term plan to return to the front in Formula 1.
Williams sustained a morale-boosting upturn in competitiveness last term as Albon spearheaded the side’s climb to seventh place in the Constructors’ Championship.
However, the Grove-based squad has regressed with an overweight FW46 car this season and dropped back to ninth place with four points across the first 14 rounds.
But Williams boss James Vowles has claimed that he’s not concerned about such setbacks due to the mass work going on behind the scenes to inspire a turnaround.
Williams has managed to beat both Alpine and Sauber/Audi to Carlos Sainz’s 2025 services, while Vowles also revealed he has hired close to 250 people in his tenure.
Albon, who retains a long-term contract, has backed Williams’ choice to turn its predominant attention to ensuring it opens the 2026 regulation reset on the right note.
Asked whether it was harder to score points as other teams develop their cars this season, Albon said: “It is, and we can see the way some other teams are upgrading.
“RB, for example, Haas. But I’m still happy with what we’re doing, what we’re focusing on.
“Realistically, if you look at the top teams, they’ve got a very strong base, a strong foundation.
“Which means that every year, even if they start off weak, they always still come out strong.
“They have the power and the people in the right places to overturn any weaknesses that they had in their car, for example.
“So yeah, you could start off maybe 2026 in a good place, decent place. But if you don’t have the right foundations, you’ll never build from that.
“You’ve seen it with other teams, they might hit the regulations in a decent place and then they just fall back throughout the year.
“I believe in the process we’re doing. I do know it can mean a bit of short-term pain, but I’m okay with that.”
Williams opted to overhaul its entire car concept over the past winter as it endeavoured to assemble a package that is more all-rounded than its peakier predecessor.
But despite the sizeable changes, Albon has revealed that the long-standing limitations embedded within the FW45 remain prevalent to an extent in this season’s car.
“There’s still a little bit of similarities between last year’s car to this year’s car,” he explained. “The extremes are much less, but there’s still the feeling.
“We look at the comments from the previous year and we can see some synergy in what we said last year to this year.
“But as I said, less extreme, but they’re there.
“And I think it’s much better now, especially the low-speed corners were something we really struggled with last year.
“Depending on the low-speed corner, we’re actually quite good this year. I mean, Monaco was a good example of that.
“But even then, it’s still some tracks, we still have these kind of two or three corners on a track that lose us too much lap time.”
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