How ‘absolutely flying’ Alex Albon is viewing emerging victory in Carlos Sainz Williams battle

Alex Albon says plaudits around his strong season with Williams this year are more validating in the eyes of the media than for him.

The British-Thai racer has scored the majority of Williams’ points in F1 2025, with Carlos Sainz having had a more difficult first half of the season than was expected.

Alex Albon: I feel I’ve got stronger every year

Albon has scored 54 of Williams’ 70 points in F1 2025, a score which would single-handedly place the Grove-based squad in fifth place in the Constructors’ Championship.

Sainz’s contribution of 16 points gives Williams an 18-point lead over Aston Martin with 10 race weekends left in the season, with the Spaniard’s move from Ferrari not translating into immediate results as Sainz has needed time to adjust to the very different handling characteristics of the FW46 and the Mercedes power unit.

Pre-season hype around Williams had seen many fans and pundits suggest that Sainz, who finished F1 2024 on a high with a second-place podium finish in Abu Dhabi, would come out ahead of Albon in their first season together.

But that hasn’t been the case, with Albon scoring a handful of fifth-place finishes to place Williams as the best-of-the-rest behind the top four teams.

But Albon said he isn’t taking the comparative differences at this point as being validation to himself of his own talents, having had to go through a career reset in joining Williams in 2022 after a year on the sidelines as Red Bull’s reserve in ’21 following him being dropped in favour of Sergio Perez at Milton Keynes.

“It’s maybe more validation to you [the media] than to me,” he told the media, including PlanetF1.com, when asked about how he’s felt after stacking up against the highly-rated Sainz.

“I feel like I’ve always had quite a strong time at Williams.

“I feel like I got comfortable pretty quickly. I learned a lot from my time at Red Bull, and then I could just gain experience. And I got stronger and stronger every year.

“So this year looks like a standout year, but I think the team’s done a fantastic job to give me the car to be able to deliver the results. And it seems to keep going.

“At the moment, it feels like we’ve just had a good run of it. I’m comfortable in the car, and I feel like the car is way more predictable to drive. It’s easier to drive on the limit.

“We’re not getting these snaps and things, which I think last year you could see sometimes would put us in the wall and things like that. It builds confidence.

“Then you can just exploit the car more and more. Once you’re really comfortable with the car, you can deliver good, consistent races, which is what we’ve been doing this year.”

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James Vowles: Alex Albon ‘incredibly mentally strong’

Team boss James Vowles was full of praise for his star performer, saying he’s seen how Albon has taken a step forward in performance every year under his leadership.

“Alex, in ’23, took a major step up, and then he’s stepped up every year. That’s my impression,” Vowles told the media, including PlanetF1.com, in Hungary.

“He has stepped up every year. But he’s always been immensely quick.

“Our first job is making sure we provide a car that’s able to achieve the results, which is what we’ve done, I believe, this year, for the first time.

“Second to that, the way I adjudicate Alex is that he has never really put a foot wrong. I struggle to look at a race or a qualifying, where he hasn’t done what’s required of him.

“Even when things go wrong, he’s so incredibly mentally strong. He deals with it, comes back the next day, and wants more.

“I see Alex is absolutely flying everywhere at the right level.

“We know that Carlos is a benchmark, that’s a fact, and Alex is performing.”

Such is Albon’s consistency in F1 2025, and the mature headspace that he’s in nowadays, that Vowles suspects Albon wouldn’t be steamrollered by Max Verstappen in the same way as what happened to him at Red Bull five years ago, even if he’s not outright quicker than he was back then.

“He will go always, ‘I’m as quick as he is’, but the simple facts behind it are you put him up against Max today, he would be a completely different animal than what was there before,” he said.

“I think that’s the clear element behind him and the way I’m perhaps adjudicating him isn’t just about how fast he is in the car, because I think he always has been, but actually how resilient he is to have everything, things going wrong around you, and how strong he is in that circumstance.

“That’s what I meant by his delivering every time. So I think his peak level, which is probably how he is adjudicating himself, has it gone up a lot? Probably not. It is the ability to get there every time there.”

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