14/08/2025 14:45
Carlos Sainz joining Williams at the start of the current F1 season
has provided Alex Albon with a serious benchmark to measure himself
against at the Grove-based squad for the first time. Upon taking a
seat at the nine-time constructors' champions in 2022, the Thai
racer had been paired with a string of underperforming and
inexperienced team-mates, from Nicholas Latifi to Logan Sargeant to
Franco Colapinto. That limited his opportunity to develop with, and
learn from, a team-mate over those three seasons, but with the
Spanish driver coming on board from Ferrari, Albon finds himself
with a competitive sparring partner for the first time since his
18-month stint at Red Bull, where he struggled to establish himself
alongside the dominant and imperious Max Verstappen. The Dutchman
has a tendency to bludgeon his team-mates into submission and has
rightly developed a reputation as a "team-mate killer", something
that is still playing out in 2025, with the difficulties Liam
Lawson and Yuki Tsunoda have faced in Milton Keynes. It led the
energy drinks-backed team to let Albon go for the 2021 campaign,
with a year out of F1 before his switch to Williams. Now, the
29-year-old can insightfully reflect on that early stage of his
career and what he took from his time with Verstappen, contrasting
it against the experience he is currently sharing with Sainz,
another one of F1's brightest talents. "It's different," Albon told
RacingNews365 when asked how much he has learned from the pair, as
part of an exclusive interview. "It's very different. "So when I
was with Max, I was so consumed in just myself trying to improve,
and a lot of that was kind of just digging myself into data and
understanding, 'Okay, why... How can Max do this?' And 'how do I
drive around these issues, and how does he feel there?' "But I was
inexperienced, so I didn't really know the right questions to ask
in many ways, and I didn't really, I never really got on top of it.
"I talk a lot about my year out, which kind of allowed me a bit
more time to get on top of it before I got back in, and then with
Carlos, it's more: I do have the bandwidth, I do have the mental
space, and I do have the knowledge to understand. "I think he's
very... There are drivers who are kind of more feel-based and more
engineering-based, and I could say Carlos is much more
engineering-based in terms of his language, and he understands the
engineering world of driving." Learning from Sainz 'outside the
car' With Albon at a more established point in his career, and
bedded into the project at Williams to return the team to its
former glory, he is better able to appraise the differences between
himself and Sainz, even the subtle ones, and use them to improve
together. When the four-time grand prix winner joined Williams,
many expected him to comfortably have the measure of Albon. That
has not been the case, and the two-time podium finisher has been
one of 2025's stand-out performers, helping to push the James
Vowles-led team to its current fifth in the constructors'
standings. Currently on 70 points at the summer break, the team has
only 14 points fewer already this campaign than in the past seven
seasons combined. And of those, Albon has 54 points to Sainz's 16.
However, there is an open and collaborative approach between the
two, as they strive to continue Williams' ascent back to
competitiveness - and there is a lot the former is taking from the
latter. "And so, when we look at each other, when I think about
Carlos and me, there is obviously the normal stuff we compare,"
Albon explained. "I look at his driving... We are different; there
are different driving styles with us. They're subtle, very subtle.
"We have a driver coach nowadays as well, who's helping us extract
that time from each other." To Albon, perhaps the biggest advantage
of being team-mates with Sainz is what he is learning from the
30-year-old off the track. "But then the other side, which I
learned from Carlos, is more is his communication and the way that
Ferrari works... their work ethic and how they present meetings and
things like that," he said. "I think that's been really
interesting, because, like I said, [he is] a driver with experience
and he knows what he wants in the car. "I've learned more, possibly
outside the car from Carlos than I have inside the car, in many
ways, but that's not in a bad way. "That just shows that he's very
good with the team and understands the direction that the car needs
to go in."
