James Vowles, Carlos Sainz Jnr, Alexander Albon, Williams, Losail International Circuit, 2025

Alexander Albon rebuilt his reputation at Williams after his bruising 2020 season alongside Max Verstappen at Red Bull.

The Grove team achieved its return to respectability partly through Dorilton’s money and James Vowles’s leadership but it was Albon who delivered the results in 2023 and 2024. Without that, Vowles might not have been able to persuade Ferrari exile Carlos Sainz Jnr to join them.

This set up a fascinating partnership between two drivers with curious back stories at Red Bull. Sainz was Verstappen’s original team mate in F1, but Christian Horner and Helmut Marko never reunited the pair at the top team. Albon was dropped by Red Bull, then rehired and hastily promoted to the top – only to be discarded again.

Some wondered if Albon might be ‘found out’ alongside his first truly testing team mate since his Red Bull days. But that certainly didn’t happen immediately, as Sainz crashed out on his first racing lap for the team and ended up providing strategic input which helped Albon to a promising fifth.

Albon repeated that result twice more over the next half dozen races while Sainz’s season got off to a false start. An early four-race run in which he consistently out-qualified Albon suggested he had already mastered the FW47, but then the team went through a rough patch where it couldn’t extract the best from its tyres over a single lap, and Albon regained the initiative.

Both drivers suffered from poor luck at times early in the season as Williams encountered overheating problems with their cars. Sainz also struggled to pick up points due to various race incidents, few of which were his doing, so that at two-thirds distance he languished 18th in the standings, 11 places behind Albon with less than a third of his points tally.

Finally, in Baku the stars aligned for Sainz. He took full advantage of a poor weekend for McLaren, planting his car on the front row and bringing it home on the podium. Even more impressively, he repeated the result in Losail, a track which seemed totally unsuited to Williams’s car.

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That clutch of strong results at the end of the season propelled him to ninth in the championship, one place behind his team mate. Albon mustered just three points from the last eight races, leaving him only nine ahead of Sainz.

While Albon unquestionably had the better results over the season as a whole, the trend was clearly in Sainz’s direction. By the end of the year he was routinely the quickest Williams driver in qualifying, enough to tip the balance in the battle between the pair. Albon may have come out ahead in year one, but it would be no surprise to see Sainz put some daylight between the pair next season.

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Unrepresentative comparisons omitted. Negative value: Sainz Jnr was faster; Positive value: Albon was faster

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