Alexander Albon pulled off the tricky one-stop strategy which gave Williams their best result of the season so far despite being unable to monitor his crucial rear tyre temperatures.
His seventh place finish in the Canadian Grand Prix moved the team up to ninth in the constructors’ championship. He achieved this through an aggressive one-stop strategy, holding off George Russell and Esteban Ocon during the final half of the race.Williams team principal James Vowles has now revealed Albon completed the entire race lacking vital data on the performance of his rear tyres. This would have been especially crucial information at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, where traction out of slow corners has a strong bearing on performance.
“We were taking bodywork off on Alex’s car just prior to the race,” Vowles said in a video released by the team. “There was a problem, not one that would have affected reliability, but one that definitely did affect us on performance and data.
“We have sensors that are pointing towards the rear tyres that tell us what’s going on. They’re infrared sensors, so they’re non-contact, but they give us basically what the tyre temperature is on the rear axle.
“They’re very, very useful to be able to understand in the race what we’re doing with the tyres. Especially when you’re trying to do what we did, which is a very long stint, you want to see how those tyres are performing – are you falling out of the window, do you need to put more energy in? Those were missing all race, which is just another testament to what Alex was really doing out there because he was, as we were, just blind on those tyre temperatures.
“He still had internal tyre temperatures, but the external was missing. What we were trying to do on the grid is fix that in the short period of time that we had available – unfortunately, unsuccessfully.”
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Williams’ decision to commit to a one-stop strategy was prompted by the early Safety Car period caused by Russell hitting the wall at turn nine and leaving debris on the circuit.
“When we went into the race, the strategy we went in with was a one-stop strategy, but the only difference to what we really did was the intention to take it all the way into around about the mid-20s in terms of stop lap – a comfortable one-stop stint,” Vowles explained.
“At the beginning of the race, that Safety Car obviously changed things quite significantly. It made it very difficult for a number of competitors, but also created an opportunity for us. We knew the life would just about be possible on that hard tyre from then onwards and what we did is, from that point on, was still open-minded to converting to a two-stop, but the situation never really appeared for us to do so.
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“Had there been another Safety Car, or Virtual Safety Car, you would have seen us stop again, for example. That one-stop would have been very difficult then. But as it turns out, we were on the right strategy and Alex did really a tremendous job.
“The way I described it to him was really a drive of champions. To make no mistake, when you have a stack of cars behind you that are clearly much quicker, with your tyres going away from you, is an extraordinary drive and he did incredibly well with it.”
Albon was able to absorb pressure from rivals over the course of the race due to a combination of team’s high straight-line speed and Albon adapting his driving as the race progressed, Vowles says.
“Going into the race, we knew one of our strengths relative to near enough most of our competitors was that we were faster in a straight line,” he said. “That’s through choice – it was a few kilometres an hour, but what it meant is that the potency of our competitors’ DRS relative to ourselves was lessened as a result.
“Really what you saw there was actually Alex doing an absolutely brilliant job. He was actually changing his line a few places in order to result in a good exit out of turn 10 and hinder others, but also in the straight line, great braking performance – really adjusting his modulation of the brake as the tyres wore out. It just meant no opportunity was created for others to even get through or alongside him.
“In part as well, that’s also that the tyres hung on in there – that the degradation wasn’t so significant that you started to lose huge amounts onto that braking region. So a combination of Alex doing a great job, a slightly lower rear wing level, or certainly faster in a straight line relative to our competitors, really paying off.”
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Albon’s team mate Logan Sargeant was the first of two retirements from the race after he was told to pull his Williams off the circuit in the early laps.
“Logan unfortunately stopped very early on in the race and it was an oil leak,” Vowles explained. “We could see that we were losing oil pressure and the reason for stopping the car was we wanted to stop it before the oil fundamentally caused a bigger problem within the power unit.
“The power unit should be fine out of it. The actual oil leak itself looks to be associated with an o-ring, which is essentially a rubber type bushing, which is sealing two pipes together, which looks to have failed. Why, we’re not sure at the moment, but more importantly, it’s something we have to fix before we go to the next race.”
After introducing upgrades to only Albon’s car last weekend in Montreal, Vowels is confident that they will improve the performance of the FW45 at all circuits.
“The upgrades that went on the car are ones that are generating downforce, just vertical load on the car. That will, depending on the track, give you more or less performance fundamentally, just depending on how sensitive it is to that downforce number.
“But ultimately it will make us quicker at all tracks. However, the base property that we have in the car, where it is better at tracks with good straight line content, will remain the same.”
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