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.
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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.
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