Alex Albon turned the airwaves blue during Sunday’s Japanese Grand Prix, letting loose a barrage of fiery radio messages that echoed through the Williams garage.
The Thai-British driver, typically cool-headed, couldn’t mask his frustration as he wrestled with a misbehaving car and questionable strategy at Suzuka.
Finishing ninth and snagging points, Albon’s race was anything but smooth, and his engineer, James Urwin, bore the brunt of his mid-race tirades.
The sparks flew early when Haas pitted rookie Oliver Bearman, prompting Albon to snap: “Yeah, well pit before then!” His irritation peaked as he fumed, “Honestly, you guys make absolutely no sense.”
But the real fireworks came when his gearbox betrayed him, grinding through shifts like a rusty gate.
“These shifts are so bad. What have we done to them? It’s been **** at the start, it’s being **** now,” he ranted.
When pressed for details by Urwin, he shot back: “Yeah, the same! The same I’ve been talking about all the time.” For Albon, the cockpit became a pressure cooker, and the radio was his release valve.
Post-race, Albon didn’t shy away from his outbursts, offering a glimpse into the adrenaline-fueled chaos of his driver’s seat.
“That is honestly me in my car. I am not... If you had my radio, you would hear me more like that than not like that,” he told the media, shrugging off any surprise from fans. The root of his rage? A gearbox setup gone awry and a strategy misstep that stung.
“But for the most part, we had a couple of shift issues that we’ve been testing all weekend, and we settled on one that we were quite happy with but it didn’t feel like the one that we settled on at the start of the race.
“So, it felt a little bit like we were driving with an FP1 and FP2, which I wasn’t too happy with,” he explained. The car’s clunky shifts hobbled his pace, leaving him fuming as he fought to stay competitive.
A strategy miscue added fuel to the fire. After Max Verstappen overtook him on track, Williams pitted him a lap later – a delay that gnawed at Albon.
“Strategy wise, it was more just because Max overtook me on track, and then we boxed a lap after and I felt that we just lost unnecessary time in that exchange,” he said.
Yet, despite the chaos, he salvaged points in a race he called “very simple, maybe a little on the boring side.”
“But I don’t mind boring when I am scoring points,” he said.
For Albon, the result was a bittersweet consolation – points in the bag, but a car and plan that left him seething.
At Suzuka, Albon’s fiery side roared to life, a reminder that even the calmest drivers have their breaking point when the machine falters and the seconds slip away.
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