Williams make 'rare' F1 discovery offering unexpected boost

Alex Albon has detailed the Williams F1 team has been finding more pace in the FW47 car than the numbers projected by its simulator.

Williams has enjoyed a strong start to the season, scoring 25 points in the opening five rounds to lift to fifth place in the constructors’ championship.

80 per cent of those points have come through Albon, with the Thai-British driver scoring at every round bar Bahrain.

Having already outscored its tally from last year, Albon stated the step forward has not come as a surprise to him.

“Directionally, I was always really confident that we were going to make progress as a team,” Albon told media including RacingNews365.

“I saw the areas, the philosophy of the car changing and the ideas we were focusing on for this year, when I look back at last year and looking at our weaknesses in our car.”

Williams is looking to long-term goals with team principal James Vowles overseeing a team revamp in a bid to see it return to front-running competition.

While gains in the years ahead is its primary goal, Albon stated the new direction is already having an effect in the current regulation cycle.

“We drove it on the simulator and it was definitely better,” Albon said. “We found more pace in the car than what the simulator told us it would be.

“That’s quite a rare thing to have and a very positive thing to have. It just shows that we're capturing things well by reverse engineering.

“We understand the good things that we've done to our car, and that should help us grow into next year. But when I look at some of the lap time differences from last year to this year, it is quite substantial.”