The Quiet Engine: Alex Albon on Williams' revival and the gamble of 2026

05 June 2025

Alex Albon does not dress up the 2025 season. Consistent, chipping away, a car that is handy enough to score points. He puts the jump down to behind-the-scenes work and steady year-on-year progress, including a deliberate choice to take a step or two backwards the previous season to make bigger steps this one. It has paid off.

Carlos Sainz's arrival has sharpened that. Sainz brings experience and Ferrari knowledge that, in Albon's words, helps the team think outside the box, testing ideas borrowed from a car philosophy that worked elsewhere and keeping what fits. He resists the idea of a team leader. The two are evenly treated and share the same pie, he says, aligned on feedback and useful to each other precisely because they come at the car from different directions: Albon knowing the team's DNA, Sainz knowing where he wants a car to be, and the pair meeting in the middle.

He is, by his own description, boring when it comes to goals. He does not hold on to a points target or chase a number; he lives each weekend as it comes and tries to make the most of it. Podiums, he thinks, will need the right circumstances, an Imola, a chaotic wet Brazil with safety cars, the days when a midfield team can be there or thereabouts when the order is scrambled.

Behind the weekend-to-weekend work sits the bigger project. This is the transition phase of the year, simulator time split between the current car and the next one, because 2026 brings sweeping rule changes.

On that reset, he is candid and a little contrarian. The hope is that new rules level the field. Albon expects the opposite. History, he says, shows the grid spreads when the regulations change, as some teams nail it and others play catch-up, the way Red Bull pulled clear of everyone in 2022. "I don't think the field is going to be very close next year." What gives Williams confidence is the Mercedes power unit, which he expects to be strong, and a car philosophy they can carry over from a good year.

The other thing he carries is where he is from. As the only Southeast Asian driver on the grid, he treats Singapore as a home race, a wall of support and love every time he arrives, and he is openly pushing for a Thai Grand Prix. He cannot share much, only that it is serious, and that he has seen a level of push from Thailand he has not seen elsewhere. Interest in the sport back home is still small, he admits, but it has grown sharply in the last year, and he will do anything, roadshows included, to help get a race over the line. He would happily be greedy and call both Singapore and Thailand home