Albon mocks ‘painful’ Monaco pace: ‘I could drive my Vespa around here’

Alexander Albon has vented about the lacklustre pace of the Monaco Grand Prix, claiming it was hard to stay focused with lap times that slow.

The Williams driver took his and the team's first points of the season, coming home in ninth, where he had qualified.

In a processional race in the principality, the top 10 remained unchanged from start to finish - the first time in F1 history the top 10 cars have finished in their starting order.

After the first lap red flag allowed runners to make their mandatory pit stop during the stoppage, the majority of the top 10 completed the remaining 76 laps on once set of tyres. That resulted in Albon being tucked up behind Yuki Tsunoda's RB for almost the entire race - with the Japanese driver dictating a very conservative pace for the pair.

"I was like 'man, I could get out and drive my Vespa around here'," the 28-year-old joked to media including RacingNews365. "That's how it is. I mean, it was so slow. It was so painful. It's actually hard to say focused when you're going that slowly, because you're just not even near anything - you're not near any limits.

"He [Yuki Tsunoda] absolutely cleared off at the end of the race, and I was like 'you could have done this the whole time', but he decided not to do it."

'It wasn't very fun'

The Thai-British driver would felt that the approach employed by Tsunoda was more extreme than it needed to be, voicing his thoughts about a race that was needlessly slow in his view.

"I think I've got everything, radiometry settings...," he replied when asked if he was now an expert on what the RB rear wing looked like. "It's annoying because he had pace. He had so much pace.

"I was like 'we can all manage. Like, I'm happy to manage, but we don't need to manage this much.' We were managing so much!"

It was put to Albon after the race that his team-mate, Logan Sargeant, had called the race "boring", and whether he agreed or disagreed.

"I don't think any other driver would say differently, apart from Charles [Leclerc] maybe," the two-time podium finisher contended.

"It was interesting. It wasn't very fun. I thought there were a couple of moments where I could have got Yuki at the start of the race, but I'm just glad I qualified P9."