After pre-season testing, Williams realized that he had not made the step forward he had hoped for with the FW44. Later, progress was also not helped by Nicholas Latifi’s two heavy crashes in Saudi Arabia.
These incidents meant that the team needed to make a huge effort to get the car ready for the Australian Grand Prix. However, Latifi had another collision, this time with Lance Stroll, in Q1 at the weekend in Melbourne.
Meanwhile, after sustaining damage in another collision with Stroll in the Jeddah race, teammate Alex Albon came to Australia with a three-place grid penalty, but was later disqualified from qualifying for failing to provide a fuel sample.
Albon was instructed to stop his car on track at the end of Q1, after the need to make an unexpectedly fast start lap after the red flag caused fuel consumption to be higher than expected.
For the race, the team fitted him with new hard tires and then opted to leave him out during the various safety car periods. On the penultimate lap, he was running seventh when he finally pitted, to comply with the regulations of using a minimum of two different compounds in the race, and secured tenth place.
This single point puts Williams in ninth position in the World Championship, ahead of Aston Martin , which continues to be the only team that has not opened its locker.
“Of course it’s a relief for the team,” Williams boss Jost Capito told Motorsport.com. “Getting a point at the beginning of the season is quite encouraging. We had a very difficult start [to the season]. And also this weekend was difficult after Saturday.”
“But that’s the great thing about racing, that things can change on Sunday. And it’s not over before it’s over. And if you keep pushing and always stay motivated and keep the team alive, and believing in yourself in the moments difficult, then fortune can change. Sometimes it has to get worse before it gets better.”
Capito acknowledged that the streak of accidents had been difficult for the team.
“There was no damage today. That helps a lot for Imola. It was difficult for the mechanics to be able to get both cars ready for this weekend, with the chassis repair and all that, so I think it’s very rewarding for the team to have point after those stressful couple of weeks.”
The decision to have Albon pit at the end of the race was not planned, and only came about after the driver managed to maintain a good pace on the hard tyres.
“It came up throughout the race,” Capito explained. “I think when you’re finally seventh, you want to enjoy it for as long as possible.”
“We don’t have experience with the tyres, and that’s a problem. And we’ve saved the two sets of softs for each car, so we haven’t driven the softs all weekend. So we had no idea. We knew from the past that the softs are really good for us. So we expected that to happen here as well.”
“And before the race, we said we have to learn how to use the tyres. So if we’re 18th and 20th on the grid, don’t push too hard, just understand the tyres, and then see what happens when we come back. we developed like that. It was a great collaboration of the pit wall.”
Asked about Albon ‘s comments on the behavior of the tyres, he added: “Alex hardly said anything. We see it in the lap times. And he would let us know if something happened. So there was hardly any communication with him, he is very calm.”
