Albon encouraged after new Williams updates deliver in Austria

Alex Albon has hailed his Austrian Grand Prix weekend as encouraging, after completing his first full race distance with a new upgrade package on his Williams FW44.

The Grove squad had introduced a series of updates in time for the British Grand Prix, but Albon was unable to evaluate them over a race distance as he was punted out on Lap 1 by Sebastian Vettel.

In Austria, Albon finished 12th of 17th classified finishers, and was just six seconds behind 10th-placed Fernando Alonso by the chequered flag, prompting the British-Thai driver to issue a positive report on the day's action.

"We were running P10 at one point, which I was really happy about," Albon told media, including RacingNews365.com.

"We were in Q2 this weekend, and in the race we were holding our own.

"With the Medium tyres, we took a step up in performance, and I was happy. It’s our first full race with the new aero package.

"We'll learn a lot from today, we'll look at the data and conclude where we're struggling, where we're weak.

"We're clearly still missing a little bit, but we're still getting to grips with the car."

Albon says new evolution takes time to understand

Despite Albon's upbeat evaluation, Williams remain rooted to the bottom of the Constructors' Championship, and the driver noted the difficulty in adapting to an updated car with a different design philosophy, in contrast to the more gradual development being pursued by teams higher up the table.

"You see the top teams are confident in their base car, and now they're just fine tuning it," said Albon.

"We've done quite a big change to the car, a different philosophy, which takes much more time to understand. It's a little bit more of a reset.

"Fortunately, today we got a full race under our belts and we can really pick the pieces out and look through the data to see where we're struggling.”