Alexander Albon, Williams, Spa-Francorchamps, 2025

Alexander Albon revealed he failed to progress beyond the first round of qualifying for this weekend’s sprint race due to another engine problem on his Williams.

The team has been plagued by problems related to the power unit, including trouble with their cooling system. Albon retired from consecutive races in Canada and Austria and both he and team mate Carlos Sainz Jnr have been compromised by similar problems.

Albon was eliminated in the first round of sprint race qualifying today as he missed the cut by four hundredths of a second. He said the problem on his car was leaving him at a disadvantage to his rivals on Spa’s long straights.

“We have an engine issue on our car,” Albon told the official F1 channel. “We had it in FP1 and then we thought we’d fixed it for FP2 [sic] and we didn’t. We were losing a lot of lap time down all the straights so we need to fix it.”

Williams team principal James Vowles previously said the team has had to compromise how it runs its car in order to mitigate their ongoing power unit problems. However Albon said this fault will likely require a replacement to fix.

“It’s a fundamental issue,” he said. “It will either be a PU change or something [else]. So we’ll get to the bottom of it and hopefully we’ll be better.”

Albon also had to back off at the end of his final lap because he encountered yellow flags at the chicane due to Lewis Hamilton’s stoppage. However he does not believe that prevented him from qualifying significantly higher.

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“Of course [with] the Lewis thing maybe [I] ‘could have, would have’ but I was on [course to set] the same lap time.”

He said the team’s car has been competitive when not compromised by power unit problems.

“In FP1 we were [third] in sector two. We were actually okay in sector two also in qualifying just now, which is where all the corners are.

“We just have an issue where we were very slow in sectors one and three with our engines. I think we’re fine, we actually have a good car, we just need to fix the issue.”

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