Why Alban Only Gets Williams Updates in Canada

(Motorsport-Total.com) – At the Canadian Grand Prix 2023 in Montreal (follow all the units in the Formula 1 live ticker here!) Williams leaves with a modified FW45: only Alexander Alban gets new parts, his teammate Logan Sargent does not. And with good reason, as Dave Robson, head of automotive performance at Williams, explains.

The bottom line is that you want to give the sergeant a chance to quietly adjust to the unfamiliar path without taking the risk that updates might be damaged if he slips up.

Or as Sergeant himself puts it: “I’m going with a car I know this weekend. That might be an advantage, especially when the weather is bad. I think I’ll get it. [das Update] And then the next race.”

What’s New at Williams in Montreal

A lot is new in the car: Williams has revised several areas on the FW45, including the air intakes in the side boxes, the rear wheel suspension, the hood, the underbody and the rear wing end plates.

Robson sums it up as “some tweaked elements,” but when asked, Williams explained that he’s been working on the update for “a few months.” “It takes time to get production through the wind tunnel, through the aero department, through the design department.”

However, from a purely technical perspective, Robson is proud of how innovative his team is. “Nothing about this update is based on anything we’ve seen in other connected cars over the past few weeks. Everything was developed months ago.”

According to Robson, most of the work was done “on the underside of the body” so it wasn’t visible to the audience. In addition, Williams “improved a number of small things” and retuned the rear suspension to account for the altered airflow. “All of this helps improve the flow of the rear wing and diffuser,” explains Robson.

Williams has invested “a lot” in this update and hopes to be “faster than before, especially since the track will suit us better than Monaco and Barcelona recently. But downforce is not that important in Montreal, so we might not see. A big change in lap times, but on other tracks. An increase in downforce should definitely be noted.

Why Williams trusts Alban

Within the team, you build a lot at Alban, like James Walls as Williams team boss recently The ‘Sky’ Podcast explained. There he said: “Alex is an underrated driver. He’s incredibly talented and in many ways a good leader for the team because he’s been there long enough to understand where we want to go.”

The sergeant is clearly lagging so far, but…

So far, Formula 1 rookie Sargent has shown nothing of the sort. In a live fight with Alban in the qualifiers If he is 0:7 behind, he is classified no better than P15 in qualifying.

How does the sergeant explain it? “Quite simply: there are some things I need to do a little bit better. If I get everything out of the car, Q2 should be possible,” he says ahead of the Canadian Grand Prix.

He has the backing of team boss Vols, who cite very few test drives as one of the reasons why Sargent has fallen behind so far. Sargent does not have the thousands of test kilometers that drivers have had in previous years.

“He’s doing his learning phase on the racetrack now. Looking back, I underestimated the extent of it,” says Vowles.

“But he’s got the ability. You can already see he’s doing faster laps than Alex at times. So for us it’s about building the structure so that Logan can continue week in and week out.”