Albon warns Williams F1 has "long road ahead" to recover

Williams finished 10th in last year’s world championship, having scored just eight points – 27 fewer than closest rivals AlphaTauri.

Albon stressed that he and new recruit Logan Sargeant will have to work closely together in order to help develop the new FW45, which will be shaken down next week.

However, he conceded that it won’t be easy as the team has to make such big steps from where it was last year.

"Obviously, Logan's coming in with fresh experience or let's just say, less experience than someone like myself,” said Albon. “But it's kind of just trying to keep it real. A lot of it is just trying to work together. We've got a long road ahead, realistically speaking.

“We've driven the sim now for a month, we're making inroads. The main thing is that feedback is the same, we've got similar areas that we want the car to improve in. So we've been chipping away at it.

“And as we've said before, it's a real team effort here to bring the car up the field. We need to be open and honest with where we are and see how it unfolds itself in Bahrain."

Alexander Albon, Williams

Photo by: Erik Junius

Albon doesn’t want to make any predictions about the team’s potential form in 2023.

"It's hard to say," he said. "I would say that we are definitely in a better position ourselves than we were end of last year. But I don't know how that translates to the circuit, I don't know how big of a step everyone else is going to make. Only time will tell.

"When you drive on a simulator, there's a lot of different things that can be misled, correlation and whatnot, you never quite know. So for now, we're in a better place. But it's hard to say really where we stand."

Expanding on the key areas that had to be addressed for this year, he added: “There were clear weaknesses in the car. It's not just me, also Nicky [Latifi] last year, Logan drove the car as well last year. There were pretty obvious weaknesses in the car.

“I can say that low speed front-locking was quite a big problem for us last year, and we're trying to get around that and understand why it was so difficult.

“So areas like that there's a common goal to improve the car and those areas, it's not just myself. The goals are pretty clear.

“Logan, even last year, he had similar feedback, he knows the problems in the car, it's not totally new to him, the feeling of the car. He gets where the car needs to be quicker. So everyone's involved in the development and trying to address the weaknesses we had.”