Life Behind the Formula One Wheel
ALEXANDER ALBON
When you’re on the grid, the adrenaline is at its peak. You spend your whole build-up to a race with so many people around you – the team, engineers, the media, and fans. But, that’s the only point where you feel truly alone. You can almost hear yourself, your heartbeat, and you’re just waiting.
You get the final call over the radio that the
last car is on the grid. The build-up is there. You can feel it, and you’re ready and kind of anxious to get going.
But then once the lights go out, it’s like a switch and everything feels very automated. It’s almost robotic. It’s like you’re just starting what you normally do.
Long before you approach turn one, you’ve already done your research on the best positioning. But, of course, circumstances change – and you always end up somewhere else on-track. You just try to look for opportunities, cover yourself, and try to get through it cleanly – that’s the main point.
But it’s strange, because it’s the onl y t i me ont rack, up unti l that point of the race weekend, that you’re actua l ly fighting right next to another car. Normally, during practice and qualifying, you’re never close to anyone. It feels very normal, though. I’ve spent a few years in single seaters and go-karts. But, it’s kind of that elbows-out approach, but staying clean on the run to turn one.
When you’re racing, the sensations of the Formula One (F1) car are similar to what you would feel in your road car, in terms of what you feel through your hands, and your backside. Of course, it’s hard to feel it in a road car when you’re driving at the speed limit. [You would have felt it] if you’ve driven on a circuit, or even on a wet road when it’s quite slippery and you can feel the car moving around or aquaplaning.
In an F1 car, the forces are much higher through a corner. I wish people could experience it because even if the cars look quick, I can guarantee you they feel far more impressive than how they look. You have to imagine: it’s like we are on a quicker version of a roller coaster all the time for two hours. And the margins are extremely small, because one loss of grip, and it’s a crash – purely because the speeds you’re doing are so high, easi ly over 200 km/h.
Also, when the cars sl ide, they lose downforce* because the car is not meant to be sideways, so it’s almost like an instant crash. So what we’re fighting with are tiny movements and subtleties of the car with huge consequences. And that’s where the difficulty lies.
“WE’RE ON A QUICKER VERSION OF A ROLLER COASTER FOR TWO HOURS”
THE THOUGHT OF F1 when I was a kid was daunting. It was like, wow! Look at these fast cars going around the track! I remember I went to Silverstone, the home of the British Grand Prix, when I was five or six. The cars had the loud V10 engines, and I saw them go past and it was a ‘ wow’ moment. They were doing a winter test before the season started, and to hear the noise and see the speed, it was like ‘oh my god’.
Even at that time, I wanted to be an F1 driver, but I didn’t really know what it involved. I had seen it on TV, but then when I saw it in real life for the first time on circuit, it was like a ‘this is no joke!’ I was blown away by it. Of course I still wanted to do it. It was daunting but at the same time I knew that was what I wanted to do.
I’m now an F1 driver for Aston
Martin Red Bull Racing, and scored my maiden podium at the Tuscan Grand Prix. It was really nice to give the team something back after they’ve supported me since day one and show them what I can do. It was a tough race and definitely not one of the easy ones. The Mugello track is brutal, especially the high-speed corners in sector two, and with so many re-starts to manage we had our work cut out. We struggled to get off the line so I knew I had to be aggressive to get all the overtakes done but we had a really good car and we knew it was good on the brakes so we used that to our advantage.
When we lost two positions on the final re-start, I was fired up as I wasn’t going to let the opportunity of a podium go by so I pushed hard to get third and I’m over the moon with the result.
Obviously Red Bull doesn’t need an introduction. It’s a very cool brand. And you get that vibe also in this team. Everyone’s super cool, basically, but there is an atmosphere where you realise you’re part of a much bigger family of top athletes who are downhill skiers, surfers, and even rock climbers. To be part of this family, and to speak to each other – we all have our areas in which we excel, and to hear their side of it and their stories, I think it’s a really cool privilege to have.
And at Aston Martin Red Bull Racing in F1, we do things no other team does in terms of media activations.
We played camel polo last year, we’ve raced dune buggies in the desert, and we had a lot more planned this year [than what we actually got to do]. Not many F1 teams can say that they would allow their drivers to do something like that, so it is cool.
I t ’s amaz i ng when you see how they started off, to where they are now. It’s gone from a party team with a strong competitive streak back in 2005 to a successful race-winning outfit, with four-straight F1 World Championship doubles. There are a lot of brains behind this team. We have a relaxed exterior, but inside we’ve got the best people in the
“WE’RE FIGHTING AGAINST OTHER CAR MAKERS TRYING TO DO THE SAME THING”
world working for us, and we all want to win. So we are competitive, we do our best, and of course we have the results to prove it – and we’re fighting against other car makers that are also trying to do the same thing.
I AM JUST THE SECOND THAI F1 DRIVER in history. The f irst was Prince Bira, a member of the Thai royal family, who took part in 19 World Championship races between 1950 and 1954. In terms of my home support, it started off in Formula Two, and there really was not much to it in the sense that I didn’t have a following or anything like that – especially given that four-wheel motorsport isn’t as big in Thailand as other countries.
I remember coming into Toro Rosso – now AlphaTauri, Red Bull’s sister team – for the first time, and I went to Thailand to see my family, friends and business partners. To see the initial growth and interest straight away was pretty incredible.
And then I recall coming back five or six months after that, so mid-way through my rookie season [ before being promoted to Aston Martin Red Bull Racing], and my picture was on the trains, I was on billboards, and things like that. It’s pretty crazy. I’m definitely not one to enjoy the spotlight, but to see it obviously means a lot and it made me very proud to be representing not just Thailand but Southeast Asia in the sport. I hope it can lead to some inspiration for young kids, and fuel interest in motorsport in general. I’d love to see more people from Asia becoming engineers, mechanics and drivers, of course, in top- level motorsport because the main source of competition is in Europe. It will be like that for a while, but I think we can do our part to try and help on the Southeast Asian side.”