Alex Albon says late braking behind his 'unusual' crash despite a strong Williams package
Alex Albon's race ended in a way even he struggled to explain. Pushed on what had gone wrong at a corner where Williams don't usually have trouble, he was honest rather than defensive about it. "Unusual crash, unusual place. Not fully understood," he said.
"Maybe braked a little later than the last lap. I think I did. Had a tailwind. And we don't like that corner as well, so we generally front lock a lot there. Then, my fault, but it happens."
It's a rare corner for Williams to struggle at, and the tailwind seems to have tipped a car that already has a tendency to lock the front axle there into one Albon couldn't pull back in time. He didn't look for anything beyond his own braking point to blame, and moved on just as quickly.
That willingness to shrug it off was helped by what the rest of the weekend had shown. Asked to reflect once the dust had settled on both the crash and the new package Williams have brought, Albon was more upbeat than the result suggested he had any right to be. "I think actually this car was not bad. This track suited us. Our pace was actually quite good throughout the race," he said.
The concern, when he dug into it, was more specific than a single track's result. "In the two medium speed corners of the track, kind of like turn one and the last corner, we were slow, which is going to make the rest of the year difficult," he added, before closing with a simple "but yeah, that's it."
It's a tidy summary of where Williams stand with the new package: strong enough overall to suit a track like this one, but with a specific medium-speed weakness that won't disappear just because one weekend went their way elsewhere.
For Albon, the more pressing fix is a straightforward one. The car issue is a longer conversation. The crash, by his own account, wasn't.
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