Williams won’t stand a chance until Vegas - Albon

Alex Albon views his points in the Italian Grand Prix as particularly crucial because he feels Williams won’t be in with a chance of scoring again until the penultimate Formula 1 round in Las Vegas.

Williams has been quick on low-downforce circuits this season but also delivered an impressive weekend in Zandvoort, where Albon finished eighth. He backed that up with seventh in Monza at a track where the team had targeted a good result, and Albon believes it’s an important result for the team’s hopes of securing seventh in the constructors’ championship given the likely competitive order at the upcoming races.

“I think it's a good step,” Albon said. “I worry about tracks like Brazil, these kind of races. But I hope we're in a better place now. We needed that, because in the next few races we're not really going to stand a chance, until Vegas. So, not to say that we're gonna take our foot off the pedal but... a good points finish here was what we needed.”

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Williams is now 10 points clear of Haas in seventh place in the constructors’ championship, having been level prior to Zandvoort. Despite the good result, Albon says it was a particularly tough afternoon in Monza under pressure from Oscar Piastri and then Lando Norris because of the relative strengths and weaknesses of his car compared to the McLaren.

“It was tricky because we were really weak in the last corner. We’re actually good through Ascari, but slow in Turn 11, and they would always catch me up through there. The degradation was huge and Logan (Sargeant) and myself, we thought it was going to be a really tough race.

“We didn't have the pace, but we had the straight-line speed, and that was what kept Lando behind. I think obviously he must be very frustrated. I would be. And we were just about good enough in Turn 1 on the brakes, that even though they have more downforce than us, it's not a clean overtake for them -- you could see every time they tried to outbrake me, they tended to go wide.”

Albon points to high temperatures as one of the reasons why Williams was struggling more than he’d hoped, expecting similar outcomes if faced with hot events as Formula 1 embarks on flyaway races until the end of the season.

“I think we still see our weaknesses. We are low-downforce -- we are better than we were last year, but especially when the track gets hot and the deg is high we really struggle. And (Monza) was a race where we struggled, on a track that should suit us.

“I think if the track was 20 degrees cooler we would have been really fast, maybe near that kind of where we qualified (in sixth). But... some work to do. We go to Asia now, it gets hot, go to America, it's kind of hot as well there.”