Alex Albon shares ‘non-stop’ lengths he went to trying to solve Red Bull woes in 2020

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Williams driver Alex Albon has shared what he was doing behind the scenes to try and make his stint at Red Bull Racing work.

Albon was speaking on the High Performance Podcast and recalling his time within the championship-winning team.

There was a time when Alex Albon’s Formula 1 career looked to be all but over.

Having broken through at Toro Rosso – now AlphaTauri and soon to be called something else – he was quickly promoted to the senior Red Bull team.

Helmut Marko and Christian Horner have gone through more drivers between their two teams than any other manufacturer in the same period.

Having a promising academy and being in the unique position of having two teams on the grid makes moving drivers around much easier.

Albon scored points on five occasions before replacing Pierre Gasly at Red Bull and finished three points behind the Frenchman in the Drivers’ Championship in 2019 despite three fewer races in the faster car.

However, 18 months later he was out of the team altogether, becoming the team’s reserve and test driver following the arrival of Sergio Perez.

The 27-year-old has now shared what he was doing to try and discover some form and catch up to teammate Max Verstappen.

It’s a task that no one has successfully completed yet, but his stock has dramatically risen since his move to Williams last year.

Albon shares behind-the-scenes work at Red Bull

Speaking about a difficult 2020, Albon said: “The year after was the troubled year, that’s when I really started to struggle at Red Bull.

“It was good for the first year, I still was behind a little bit with Max [Verstappen], but I had some really good showings, some qualifyings went really well and some races too.

“The year after the car changed quite a lot, it became much trickier to drive and I think that’s especially where experience helps to get you out of these problems. I didn’t really know what direction the car needs to go in.

“What I ended up realising in hindsight, what I ended up going down, was this feeling of overanalysing, being overly critical, going a bit more down that road.

“I spent so much energy trying to find a solution, trying to find the problem when really I believe I should have taken a step back a bit, trusted myself a bit more, not go through the data so much, I was looking at the data non-stop.

“I was having meetings non-stop, coming back to Milton Keynes to the factory, doing that sort of thing, doing extra sim days trying to find solutions for the car, I was forcing it.”

Albon might have one eye on Red Bull going into 2025 with Sergio Perez’s contract set to expire next year.

He’ll have to join the queue of drivers who want to jump into the fastest car on the grid, although he may be wary of returning to the team after such a difficult exit.

Other top teams will be paying close attention to Albon if they want to refresh their driver line-up before the major rule change in 2026.

He’s reaching the point in his career where his next move has to set him up to start challenging for race wins and championships.