Are Albon and Williams the perfect F1 partnership?

After Williams’ second double points finish of the season in Saudi Arabia, Alex Albon has now produced points finishes in four out of the first five race weekends in 2025. This includes three consecutive points finishes over the first three races, a feat Albon had never achieved during his time at Williams.

At the Melbourne season-opener, the Thai driver also achieved his best-ever result with the Grove team, finishing fifth in a chaotic race amid the Albert Park downpours. The result was briefly one better, as Mercedes’ Andrea Kimi Antonelli had been given a five-second post-race penalty for an unsafe release. But the case was later dismissed and fourth became fifth.

Any viewer watching the post-race interviews could see how much this meant to Albon, whose grin was unrelenting. He joked to F1’s Australian GP post-race show: “I wish this wasn’t the first race because there’s not the appreciation for a P4. When you grind it out and you’ve had a tough season and then you get that P4, it’s amazing. We’ve just come in and we’ve immediately got P4!”

Speaking alongside Albon about the car’s performance at the time, Williams team principal James Vowles said: “I don’t think it’s Australia-specific.

“We were actually fast in Bahrain testing. [That’s a] completely different track; it’s a different surface. We were fast when it was 48 degrees on track on Friday, and fast in the wet on inters.

“So it’s probably a good mix of conditions where we’re okay.”

The subsequent races proved him correct. The Chinese GP had warmer, dry conditions while the Japanese GP was cool and slightly damp. The Bahrain GP didn’t quite to go plan for the team, but in Saudi Arabia, with very similar weather, the car proved speedy.

A variety of different corner speeds at which Albon held his own also proved the Williams machinery has a decent range of performance. He finished seventh after the post-race disqualifications in China and ninth in Japan.

And the Saudi Arabian GP, during which his new Williams team-mate Carlos Sainz gave him DRS to keep him out of the clutches of a chasing Isack Hadjar, produced another points finish, again in ninth.

Albon has proven during his time at Williams that he is a talented driver. He has come out on top against all his former team-mates, consistently outperforming Nicholas Latifi and Logan Sargeant. Rookie Franco Colapinto stepped up the competition somewhat after a mid-2024 swap with Sargeant, but Albon still outqualified Colapinto seven to two and outscored him eight points to five over the nine races they contested together.

There was a shaky stint at Red Bull which eventually saw him without a race seat for 2021. But the second car alongside Max Verstappen has proven a difficult one to pilot, with a series of driver changes stemming back to Pierre Gasly in 2019 culminating in Liam Lawson’s swap with Yuki Tsunoda ahead of this year’s Japanese GP.

Albon made his return to F1 with the Grove team in 2022, which proved to be a turbulent season, interrupted midway by appendicitis which saw him sit out the Italian GP at Monza. Only three points finishes that year saw him finish 19th in the championship. When he was finishing outside of the points, however, he generally wasn’t far off, with multiple 12th and 13th-place finishes.

Improvement came in 2023, when he scored all but one of the team’s 28 points. Williams finished seventh in the constructors’ standings, and Albon finished 13th in the drivers’.

2024 was a more difficult season for Williams, littered with crashes and retirements. The team finished ninth in the constructors’, ahead of only Sauber, which went point-less until Zhou Guanyu finished eighth at the Qatar GP in December.

But this year has been Albon’s best start to a season since his Red Bull days, and Williams’ best start since 2016.

Alex Albon, Williams

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images

Coming into 2025, Albon had a new team-mate in Sainz, who found himself without a renewed Ferrari seat after Lewis Hamilton’s shock move to the Italian team. As a four-time race winner, expectations on Sainz were high, and those on Albon were perhaps lowered, given Sainz’s previous successes with the Scuderia.

But Albon has so far proven any naysayers wrong, outperforming Sainz in the first three race weekends of the year. Sainz retired from the race in Bahrain after contact with Tsunoda, but now seems much more comfortable with the car, finishing one place ahead of Albon, eighth, in Jeddah after qualifying an impressive sixth.

But neither Sainz’s previous struggles nor recent upturn in performance should discredit the fact that Albon has been driving exceptionally well. Now more than ever, the pairing of Albon and Williams just seems to work.

Speaking ahead of the 2025 season, Vowles said: “What I love about Alex is he’s a leader. When things get difficult, he pulls forward, irrespective of what the circumstances are, and lifts the team back up to emotional strength.

“He’s had a frustrating year himself. Reflecting on all that, Alex is the driver that I know he can be. I think [in 2025] he’ll reset, start again and he’ll be strong from the beginning.”

With a promising car this year, and one that, so far, has been plagued with fewer hefty crashes than last season (other than Sainz’s off in the rainy Australian GP), Williams is likely looking forward to 2026’s new regulations with optimism amid suggestions the changes will favour teams using Mercedes power units.

Albon also brings immense support with him, especially from Southeast Asia and Thailand, under whose flag he races. As could be seen in the most recent season of Drive to Survive, Singapore is a standout race for his supporters as the closest race to Thailand on the current calendar. Given suggestions there could be a Thai GP in the not-too-distant future, support for Albon and Williams could swell even further.

Alex Albon, Williams with Paetongtarn Shinawatra, Thailand PM

Photo by: Alex Albon

Despite Albon’s contract expiring at the end of the 2026 season, he seems committed to the team and it seems committed to him. Albon has not, at least publicly, expressed interest in a move any time in the immediate future. He wants to see the team into the 2026 regulation changes along with Sainz.

With 19 rounds still to be contested, the temptation to make assumptions about the rest of the season must of course be resisted. However, if Albon’s start to the year is anything to go by, things look promising for the races ahead – and for Williams moving into the F1’s next era.