Albon: Williams has 'decent car to go racing with'

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Alex Albon enjoyed a full day in the Williams on Friday, the final session of this year's pre-season testing at Bahrain International Circuit.

Albon's first stint in the FW46 on Wednesday had ended up with the car having to pull over to the side of the track with a fuel pump issue. Tere had been further glitches to the car when Logan Sargeant took over.

But all was looking a lot better for the team on Friday, with Albon taking the wheel for the entire day and completing 121 laps without any issues, with Albon feeling happy with how the car was shaping up.

"We’ve got a decent car to go racing with!" he declared after his time on track finally came to an end. His best lap time of 1:30.984s was 0.662s slower than pace setter Charles Leclerc in the Ferrari and put him sixth on the timesheets.

"We did a bit of a radical set-up today and this worked out for the better," he reported. "We struggled a little bit with the car across day one and two with just how different it is, struggling to rebalance it.

See also: Bahrain pre-season test - Day 3 in pictures

"But we've made some big headway in making the car more driveable," he continued. "With the changing car characteristics, we shifted some of our historical problems to different areas.

"We’ve been able to fix some of these, but unfortunately in the process we’ve picked up a few things we didn’t like. Despite this, we did a bit of a radical set-up today and this worked out for the better.

"Looking at the rest of the grid, the midfield has closed up a lot with everyone making a big jump from last year, so it’s all quite equal throughout the field," he said when asked how he felt the new Williams compared to its rivals.

"This year is going to be all about the fine details and potential tracks that better suit others, so there are going to be lots of interesting battles."

©Williams

Williams' Head of Vehicle Performance Dave Robson was happy with how the final day had gone. "We did another 120 laps and this time without any car issues.

"Alex was able to build on the work done by Logan yesterday and continued to evolve the FW46.

"Across a range of fuel loads, the car was behaving well, and Alex was able to complete a decent race simulation using two of the tyre compounds that will be available next week.

"Inevitably at this time of year there is a lot of scope to push the FW46 harder and to develop it quickly," he continued.

"We have a few days to analyse the data from this week [before the Bahrain GP next weekend], to decide how we build the cars for FP1 and how we look to introduce the first round of car updates.

"There is a lot to do but we have made a solid start and have a good foundation to build on."

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.