On fire Albon 'almost disappointed' to qualify P8 at Silverstone

Alex Albon said that he was almost "disappointed" to finish 8th in Saturday's British Grand Prix qualifying given Williams' incredible run of form since the start of the weekend.

Albon and to a lesser degree teammate Logan Sargeant had been on fire from the outset at Silverstone, with the pair outgunning on Friday many of their usually faster rivals.

But in qualifying, F1's usual suspects, and McLaren, stepped up their performance although eighth in the pecking order in Q3 was still a solid result for Williams and Albon.

"It's been an amazing weekend," said the Anglo-Thai racer. "It's almost like you've finished qualifying somehow disappointed, but with a Q3 P8!

"But we have to be realistic. I think we've been on top of it early in the weekend. I think I've also just been in the rhythm very quickly this weekend as well, getting well adapted to the wind changes and all this kind of thing.

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"So I felt like we've hit the ground running. And as the weekend's gone along, everyone's kind of caught up, basically.

"And by Q3, I'm sure there's a little bit of sandbagging from other teams as well, but we ended up kind of where we expected to be after Friday, at least.

"But it's still an amazing result, and if you told us this before the weekend started, we were looking at around P15. So it's been a great weekend so far."

As impressive as his performance was, Albon's Saturday afternoon session wasn't a cool breeze from start to finish.

In Q1, the damp track threw a wrench into the works of several drivers, while a red flag in the closing minutes of the segment left the Williams driver with a frantic single flyer to ensure his safe passage into Q2.

"I was pretty sideways!" he said. "It was very wet, I think you saw in Sector 2 in Q1. And it was really tricky, because there was like these kind of imaginary rivers across the track.

"As soon as you got to a certain point in the corner, the car would lose all grip, but you couldn't actually physically see it.

"So you had to push up until this imaginary boundary, and then catch the snap and then go in, and I was a bit too optimistic.

"I was kind of glad Checo [Perez] was the first car because you could have a bit of a sighter to that car. And you can tell what the gap is going be.

"I was glad to get through from Q1. And it was it's always tricky there, because anyone can get through in those conditions."

Albon was also intrigued by the sudden amount of degradation he picked up in Q3 and which upset his car's balance in the high-speed corners.

"The session was going quite smoothly," he said. "And in Q3 as the track dried out and corner speeds picked up and track evolution came in, I started to get quite a bit of deg through the lap, front deg as well, which is quite rare.

"So we need to kind of understand that, why Q3 we started to struggle quite a lot in sector two and three in the high-speed corners, with the front tyre falling away.

"So I'm not sure if that would have been enough for P7, because there's a bit of a gap to Lewis [Hamilton], but it was still enough where I feel like we should have been closer today than then we were."

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