F1 returnee Alex Albon says a bicycle accident while training with his good friend George Russell back in 2017 marked the start of a difficult period during which he believed his career in motorsport was over.
The former Red Bull driver returns to the fray this season with Williams after spending a year on the sidelines.
But five years ago, when he was racing in the FIA Formula 2 Championship, Albon underwent a period of uncertainty that started with a benign training session in the first part of the season in Russell's company.
"He lived about two minutes from my house, but he would eat more food at my house than I ate at my own house," recounted Albon, speaking on a Motor Sport Magazine Podcast.
"He was always coming around. We would always have lunch and dinner together. He was kind of part of the family."
One day, the pair decided to go mountain biking in a forest nearby where they followed a horse path until they encountered an unexpected massive drop that sent Albon flying.
©Instagram/AlexAlbon
"I was going fairly quickly but not breakneck speed," remembered the Williams driver. "I'm not some maniac on a bike.
"Suddenly there's this kind of... We didn't realise at the time, but we were going down a horse track, and there was kind of this horse jump thing."
Albon tumbled and fractured his collarbone which forced him to miss his next F2 race with ART Grand Prix in Baku.
Upon his return to the grid in early July at the Red Bull Ring in Austria, Albon discovered a car that was very different to the one he had previously driven, and for good reason as it had been crashed by his substitute Sergey Sirotkin.
"I came back, and I was expecting a bit more, I finished like fifth and sixth," Albon explained.
"And then, from that point onwards, it was a disaster. I had a terrible season, and it was just one of those seasons which just never clicked.
"I never want to point fingers at anything, but I still believe that there was something wrong with the car that, after the crash, it was never the same.
"And yeah, it was one of [those] things. It was disappointing at the time, but it basically meant from going, I think I was like, third in the championship before the incident, to finishing absolutely nowhere.
"I was seventh or something like that, which in a top team was devastating."
With little results to show and no funding in place for 2018, Albon genuinely believed at that point that he had reached the end of the road.
"It wasn't good enough," he said. "At that point, I didn't have the funding to go again, and I was back to square one. I was back to 2012.
"I was back to this feeling like I wasn't going to be able to race, and it was kind of one of them weird things where, I finished the season, and, during that whole season, I was just struggling.
"I was [thinking that] it all feels like it's falling away a little bit."
Fortunately, a good performance in F2's post-season test in Abu Dhabi put him back on track, the British-Thai racer enjoying a second season in F2 with French outfit DAMS in 2018 that saw him finish third in the championship behind his current F1 colleagues George Russell and Lando Norris.
And the rest is history...
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