Alexander Albon explains the harsh words against his team on the radio and is satisfied with the third top 10 result in the third race
Alexander Albon didn’t seem to have a good day in his car today. Although he scored points in his Williams for the third time in three races, the Thai driver caused more of a stir with his grumpy radio messages to his team, in which he complained about the gear changes and later about his strategy.
Initially, the gearbox didn’t quite meet Albon’s expectations: “These shifts are so bad,” he complained. “What have we done to them? They were shit at the start and they’re still shit now.”
Then, towards the middle of the race, Albon had another outburst: “Seriously? You guys don’t make any sense at all – ridiculous,” he fumed about the strategy, to which his engineer pointed out that Oliver Bearman was in the pits. Albon’s reply: ‘Well then just get me in before that!’
Asked about the radio messages, Albon replies after the race: ”I think it was a boring race, so they just kept my radio on.”
He adds to Sky that he is just like that in the car and that it was not a Suzuka-specific phenomenon. “If you heard my radio in full, you would hear me like this more often,” he emphasizes.
Gear changes not as desired
But what was the problem with both radio messages? “We had a few problems with the gear changes that we tested throughout the weekend,” explains Albon. “In the end, we agreed on a variant that we were satisfied with – but it didn’t feel as expected at the start of the race.”
LAP 10/53
“These shifts are so bad”
Alex Albon is not at all happy with his Williams at this stage of the Grand Prix F1 JapaneseGP pic. twitter.com/bx2whtcQ2A
— Formula 1 (@F1) April 6, 2025
Instead, it felt like Albon was driving with the settings from training, “which didn’t exactly make me happy. Then we changed that and fixed it,” said the Williams driver, who otherwise had a relatively easy race in sporting terms.
Albon had started from ninth on the grid and had maintained this position throughout the race – with Isack Hadjar (Racing Bulls) in front of him and Oliver Bearman (Haas) behind him. “It was basically a pretty boring race,” he says. “But I like that – when I score points, I don’t mind boring races.”
What annoyed Albon during the pit stop
The only excitement for him was around the pit stops, which drove his blood pressure up a little. That was because he was not satisfied with his crew’s decision. “The explanation: Max overtook me on the track and we went into the pits straight after – I just had the feeling that we lost time unnecessarily.”
Williams wanted to respond to Bearman’s undercut attempt, and when Albon pointed out that they should have called him in earlier, he was told that it would have been even worse. So they left him out, but he didn’t like being overtaken by Max Verstappen, who had already made a pit stop.
Frustration in the race for Alex Albon F1 JapaneseGP pic. twitter.com/2J1VePhwJ7
— Formula 1 (@F1) April 6, 2025
“I didn’t feel like we needed to lose time,” says Albon, reckoning he lost a second and a half to Hadjar as a result. “And then we pitted straight after the pass. I’m sure they’ll explain to me why – maybe we would have otherwise got behind another car – but at the time it felt like we lost time.
“If we had stopped on the same lap as Ollie or the one before, we wouldn’t have had the problem in the first place,” Albon notes, adding: ”In my head, I always race against the car in front of me, not the one behind me. I didn’t want to lose any time on Isack, and after the pit stop, he was about five and a half or six seconds ahead of me.”
Although Albon was able to reduce the gap to 3.6 seconds by the finish, “in the end it just wasn’t quite enough,” he says ruefully.
Third time points in three races
Nevertheless, he is very satisfied with ninth place in a race in which all 20 drivers saw the checkered flag, because the circumstances were not so easy for him. “I felt like we were pretty limited with the car,” said the Williams driver, who complained about various balance issues in different types of corners.
“The wind didn’t blow to our advantage in some corners. On Friday, the wind was still helping us, but on Sunday it changed completely,“ he says.
”Nevertheless, we scored points, and that just shows: even on days when we are not optimally positioned, we still manage to get something out of it. That makes me very happy.”
For Albon, it was his third top-10 finish in as many races, following a fifth place in Australia and a seventh in China. It has been a while since Williams last finished in the points in three consecutive races: in 2017, the drivers were Felipe Massa and Lance Stroll.
