Williams Formula 1 team principal James Vowles has revealed the reasoning behind Alex Albon’s extended pit visit during the Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix, explaining how a loose onboard camera prompted the team to turn a compromised race into a testing session.
It was a difficult weekend for the Grove outfit in Barcelona, with car weaknesses exposed by the high-speed, high-temperature demands of the circuit.
Speaking in his post-race Vowles Verdict debrief, the team boss detailed how the safety risks associated with the loose onboard camera necessitated an immediate intervention to prevent ruining the race for the rest of the grid.
“With Alex, he wasn’t running in a point-scoring position and we wouldn’t have been able to score points from where he was in the race,” Vowles explained.
“That then got combined with the fact that the camera on the car, you would have seen it starting to wobble. What we do not want to be doing is impacting the race of others. The worst case is that the camera falls off, causing a safety car or VSC [virtual safety car], and that was all fixable by us, fundamentally stopping the car and making sure it’s attached correctly.”
Rather than simply reattaching the hardware or sending Albon back out into a fruitless grand prix, Williams made the most of the interruption and used the remaining laps to collect valuable data.
Alexander Albon, Williams
Photo by: Kym Illman / Getty Images
“Our second thought process is we wanted to make sure that we were out of bed there,” Vowles continued. “We weren’t in a good place in terms of performance. But we had a number of test items we wanted to run through, and the best way of doing that was stopping the car, chatting to Alex, changing some of the car set-up, which is what we did in the race and going back out again.
“So that delay that you saw was really twofold. One, we were making those changes, but two, we were also waiting for a pitstop from Carlos. And what we can’t do is have our crew working on that car while we’re servicing the other car in the pitlane.
“So that’s the reason for that short delay, and then Alex went back out again to effectively go through some of those test items.”
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