Star Williams driver Alex Albon has provided an interesting reason about how smaller teams like his could benefit from shorter race weekends. The topic of shorter race weekends has been in discussion ever since F1 CEO Stefano Domenicali hinted at plans of reducing the number of practice sessions.
Domenicali stated that F1 will try and have just one practice session in the future. He believes that while these sessions are useful for engineers, fans do not like them. There has been a huge focus on working towards making the sport more interesting ever since the 57-year-old took charge and this is just another attempt at doing so.
Alex Albon explains how shorter race weekends will help Williams
Albon has given his support for shorter race weekends as he believes that doing so will help the teams to rotate their staff less frequently. However, he did admit that some sort of bias could affect his viewpoint.
In a conversation with motorsport.com, the Williams driver explained, “If you limit testing, then to be honest, the randomness factor increases at the weekend”. He believes that such a scenario could help his team as all sides have lesser time on their hands to prepare, and hence, this could give smaller teams more of a chance to compete.
This is not the only reason why Albon believes shorter race weekends will help Williams though, as he also explained how his side often has a better car in the earlier part of the week. Hence, if qualifying is moved earlier, then Albon and Williams could benefit by using their package at the time of the weekend when it works best.
Albon and Williams have a promising start to the 2023 season
After a disastrous 2022 season, Williams seemed to have produced a far better package for this campaign. Last year, the British outfit finished last with just eight points, 27 points behind ninth-placed AlphaTauri.
And the disappointment did not just arise because they finished last, but because they had produced a car that was far off the pace even when it came to the other midfield teams. However, things do look far more promising this season even though Williams is once again last in the Constructors’ Championship with just a point to their name.
Albon scored that solitary point thanks to his outstanding tenth-place finish in Bahrain. While the Thai driver did show promise at other races as well, misfortune accompanied by some poor judgment resulted in him not being able to score any other points for the team.
For example, Albon was forced to retire in Saudi Arabia because of a sudden brake failure after running in 13th for most of the race. Meanwhile, the 27-year-old had even more of a heartbreaking moment in Australia as he crashed out of the race while running in P6.
