Alex Albon believes F1 kept playing his angry radio messages as the Japanese Grand Prix due to the fact it was “boring”.
Albon qualified and finished ninth at Suzuka to continue his strong start to the season. During the race, however, the usually calm Thai-British driver was particularly vocal about the gear shifts of his FW47 machine.
At one point he labelled them “shit” before going on to claim the team “made zero sense” and was “ridiculous” over a strategy decision.
Reflecting on the race, Albon, who has 18 points from three races, explained how Williams experiments through the weekend – and even Max Verstappen – were the causes behind the outbursts.
“It was a boring race, so they kept using my radio messages,” Albon explained to media, including RacingNews365.
“We’ve been experimenting with shift settings all weekend and we landed on something that we were quite happy with in the end, but it felt better in qualifying and not in the race, so we reverted.
“Then in terms of strategy, it was more I just didn’t feel like we needed to lose time behind Max when he overtook us – we lost about a second-and-a-half to Isack [Hadjar], and then we boxed immediately after [Verstappen] overtook me.
“In the moment, it felt like we had wasted a second but the car was not easy to drive this weekend, the wind and corners were not playing to our favour and on Friday, the wind suited us more and it flipped 180 degrees.
“But we still scored points, that shows that on the days we’re not optimal, we are still able to score some points.”
In finishing P9, it means Williams has scored points in three successive grands prix for the first time since Felipe Massa did so in the 2017 Malaysian, Japanese and United States GPs.
