‘We’ve tried everything’ – Albon explains Williams’ tyre struggles in ‘frustrating’ Qualifying at Monza

Alex Albon has cited Williams’ struggles to get the soft tyre working as being the root of their Qualifying troubles at the Italian Grand Prix, with the team suffering a double Q2 exit despite displaying promising pace in the weekend’s practice sessions.

The Grove-based squad caused a surprise when Carlos Sainz and team mate Albon were eliminated in P13 and P14 respectively, leading to a frustrated message from Sainz over the team radio.

Asked after Qualifying if the problems in getting the C5 compound working had been the key issue during the session, Albon answered: “Yeah, it will be interesting to hear what Carlos has to say.

“It’s not that we’re not trying – we’ve tried absolutely everything this weekend, and even in Qualifying between cars we were trying different things and yet we finished on the same lap time, but we know it’s not working.

“We know it’s not working because when we’re going through practice and we can do multiple laps, we can get the tyre to work and we can be quick, and then we come into Qualifying when obviously it’s quite restricted what you can do on out laps and whatnot, and we just can’t get it firing and, yeah, frustrating.”

Pushed on whether the team can hope for better on Sunday given that the squad’s race pace appears better, Albon responded: “Exactly, race pace tyres get hot and actually fall into the window that we want them to be in.

“It sounds a weird track but it’s actually not that easy to overtake here, so let’s see what we can do. But we can work together, we’re obviously next to each other on the grid so we can play around with strategy and try to get a couple of points.”

On the other side of the garage, Sainz echoed Albon’s comments about Williams’ issues with the soft tyre.

“I think I was in this TV pen yesterday warning that it was going to be a lot more difficult, and to [not] believe too much our pace from yesterday because I know how difficult our car is when it comes to Qualifying, in one single lap on tyres is really, really difficult to get everything to work,” the Spaniard explained.

“Yesterday we had multiple laps on softs to get them to work, and we were finally doing some good laps. But today, once you get a single chance, our tyres are a bit of a lottery right now and we struggle with this car like we have done all season, and unfortunately we didn’t get it to work.”

Despite this, Sainz is hopeful of still being able to battle for a top-10 finish, saying of his prospects for Sunday: “I’m going to try to get into the points. I think that should be our target. I think we have the pace – hopefully we can do some overtakes.”