Red Bull has gone from once again dominating Formula 1 to experiencing an internal crisis that has worsened since last year. A sporting crisis as a result of a second seat that drivers like Alex Albon know very well what it is like to experience. This is the outlook for Red Bull which, according to rumours, could even lose Max Verstappen at the end of the season, who is sitting out at Mercedes.
The Red Bull quarrel divides the team
Furthermore, this quarrel or this moment of crisis experienced by the energy drink team overlaps with the two poles with their top managers at odds. In this case, the team boss, Christian Horner, and the sports advisor, Helmut Marko, who in turn is one of the four-time world champion’s confidants.
That is why, in the context of the controversy surrounding Red Bull due to the poor performance of the young New Zealander, the words of Alex Albon are recalled when he was a teammate of the Dutchman, and he explained the reason for the difficulty in driving that car.
Here, Alex Albon himself, who previously raced alongside Verstappen during the second half of 2019 and all of 2020, understands the difficulties of being his teammate better than most. For example, on Thursday in China, Albon shared his thoughts on Lawson’s situation.
Alex Albon already spoke at the time about the difficulty of being in the second Red Bull
“I think the grid is tighter than ever. That means that if you don’t have full confidence in the car, it’s more than likely that you’ll be left out in Q1,“ he said. ‘It’s not easy to have the car that Max has.”
Albon moved from Toro Rosso to Red Bull in the summer of 2019, swapping seats with Pierre Gasly. He spent a year and a half as Verstappen’s teammate before being replaced by Sergio Pérez in 2021.
“To tell the truth, the car is what it is, he is very fast, so what ends up happening is …” but he went on to say, ”He has a rather unique driving style, it’s not so easy to get along with him.”
“They start behind Verstappen, but not by much, until the season progresses and you have to take risks”
Albon considers that he was behind the four-time champion with Red Bull, but there isn’t much difference either. “What ended up happening was, especially during my year, that you start out a little bit behind, but not by much”. “And then, as the season goes on, Max wants that front end on the car, he wants it to be more stable,” he added. “As it gets more and more fine-tuned, it goes faster and faster, and for you to catch up, you have to start taking a little more risk.”
To give people an explanation of what it feels like, if you turn up the sensitivity (in a computer game) to the maximum and move the mouse, it slides all over the screen, that’s what it feels like. It becomes so aggressive, it makes you a bit tense,” says the now Williams driver and former Red Bull driver.
Within Red Bull, he replaced Pierre Gasly, who was sent back to Toro Rosso due to his disappointing results in the top team. In addition, with the arrival of Albon, the Austrian structure signed a new engineer with whom, according to Albon, the collaboration was not very smooth at the beginning of their relationship.
“I’m a quiet person and I wanted to get to know the people around me. My engineer was also new to the team, he arrived three months before me, so he didn’t have the same knowledge either. He came from Formula E.”
Things didn’t go very well with the rest of his team in the first few weeks either: “I was still a bit uncomfortable and didn’t know how to build relationships with the others,” he explained.
On the other hand, the pressure from the media did not help Albon either, who went from F2 to Toro Rosso and later to Red Bull in a matter of months: “The tension around the change was also enormous. Every mistake, everything you do is criticized. It was also a very hot seat, there were a lot of driver changes at the time.”