Williams owns up to botched strategy calls for Albon

Williams team principal James Vowles acknowledged the British outfit's botched management of Alex Albon's race strategy in the Dutch Grand Prix.

Vowles said that Williams had miscued both its calls for Albon, at the start of the race and in the closing stages of the event.

Contrary to the majority of the field, Williams opted not to switch Albon – or teammate Logan Sargeant for that matter – onto the intermediate tyre when the rain suddenly set in on the opening lap of the race as the team believed that the downpour would not last.

In hindsight, it proved to be the wrong call by the Williams strategists.

"You either stop on lap one or lap two, or you stay out," Vowles said, quoted by Motorsport.com.

"And the real wrong that a number of teams did is then stop after that point. Once you're committed, commit.

• Read also: Williams to investigate Sargeant's hydraulic pressure issue

"The reason why we didn't stop was on the radar initially it didn't look like it was going to be as bad as it was. Now, clearly, the losses were quite significant to inter runners.

"You still saw us come back into a points position. It's not outlandishly terrible, but it was the wrong decision."

When another rain front hit the track in the closing stages of the race, Albon was once again told to stay out, the Anglo-Thai racer stopping a lap later than most of his rivals, which was too late according to Vowles.

"What we need to go back and do is go look at our systems, our tools, our communication, what can we improve in that process? Because we got it wrong," he added.

"The second stop as well, coming in for those inters, again, that was wrong. That was one lap late.

"On all of these the key point is to reflect on it. We know it's one lap late, that's the easy but the hard bit is how in hindsight, with all the information you have, can you pull that back and do a better decision with it?"

Albon, who concluded his day 8th in the running order, agreed with his team boss that a thorough analysis of last weekend's race was in order.

"We need to review that second pitstop call," he said.

"It's so tricky because I didn't pit and for the first half lap, I thought perfect, I've actually overcut everyone right now, I've overcut the two cars in front of me, because sector one and midway through sector two it was still dry.

"And then within 10 seconds, we went from a slick to a full wet tyre. And I was crawling in the last four corners, and we lost out to Lando [Norris] and George on the on the undercut.

"It's one of those things. It feels like we finished today slightly disappointed that we didn't finish sixth, but we still finished eighth. It's still an amazing result for us.

"And we've been here on pace this weekend, there's no mistake about it. It's been our strongest weekend. It's the best I've felt in the car in my time at Williams."

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