“Red Bull reserve driver role killed me” – Alex Albon opens up about his year on the side lines and losing up on his dream

Samriddhi Jaiswal | 29/04/2022
"Red Bull reserve driver role killed me" - Alex Albon opens up about his year on the side lines and losing up on his dream

Alex Albon has taken back a seat in the F1 with the Williams team after spending one year on the sidelines as a Red Bull reserve driver.

Alex Albon has made an impactful return to the grid in the Williams outfit. The Thai driver scored his first points of the season in the Australian GP.

Albon drove the Red Bull for two seasons alongside Max Verstappen. He was replaced by Sergio Perez in the 2021 season. Albon got demoted from his full-time driver role to a reserve driver role after he could not deliver an up to mark performance.

“It killed me, it was terrible,” he said in Beyond The Grid podcast. “It got announced that I wasn’t going to be a racing driver pretty late, I think it was December.”

“They still believed in me and still trusted me, Christian [Horner] and Helmut [Marko], everyone at Red Bull, and I still have a great relationship with them.”

“But on my side, it was more or less like: ‘I want to be in F1. I feel like I’m the hungriest driver I know, how can I get back into it?” he further added.

Also Read: Alex Albon opens up about his friendship with other F1 stars like Lando Norris

Alex Albon wanted to prove a point

As painful as it was for Albon to sit in the garage and watch Max And Perez, he believes that the reserve role helped him look at things from a different perspective.

He wanted to prove a point and therefore played a part not just in the development of the 2021 red bull car but also in learning from the full-time drivers.

“What was also important was just listening to Max [Verstappen] and Checo [Sergio Perez]; I’d always listen to their engineers… and I would take bits from it. As people, their personalities – how did they interact with the team and how did they learn?

“It was quite interesting to have that step back away from the spotlight and from the paddock in that way, and look at things from a different perspective,” he said.

Also Read: Max Verstappen and Alex Albon think marketing should not be allowed on the F1 paddock

Post Edited By: Jatin Hasija
Alex Albon Max Verstappen Red Bull Williams

About the author

Samriddhi Jaiswal

Samriddhi Jaiswal is an F1 editor and writer at The SportsRush. She started her career as a business journalist but soon found her calling in lights out here we go! Samriddhi has been a Ferrari fan even when her interaction with F1 was occasional. Her first real experience with the thrilling sport came when Charles Leclerc clinched his iconic victory in Spa and Monza and painted the track red. Now, a Tifosi, Samriddhi is a hardcore fan of the prancing horse and can relate to the chaos within the Italian camp and also admires Ayrton Senna and Michael Schumacher. Off the track, she finds her home in books and musical instruments.

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