Belgian GP: Race of mixed fortunes for Williams F1 Team

Alex Albon:
"It was a frustrating day today. We had a good start, and you begin to think you can keep up with the midfield, but our pace just dropped away. We've had a super clean weekend and had stronger pace up until qualifying, where we made some changes that impacted our race pace today, leaving us with quite a slow car. We know other teams are progressing much faster than us and our Baku upgrade likely won't close this gap, but we'll do what we can to find more performance."

Carlos Sainz:
"It was a race of two halves today. We had to start P19 after a penalty due to changing the ESME and got some damage to the front wing in the first lap when everyone bunched up into turn 1. Changing the front wing cost us additional time, but with the new wing, the car was in a much better place, and I had good pace until the end of the race, overtaking some rivals and closing the gap to the cars ahead.

Ultimately, we extracted everything we could from the car. While we know the gap is increasing to the midfield and our upgrades coming won’t completely fill this, we’ve got some good learnings we can take forward. On to Hungary."

James Vowles, Team Principal:
"We got the most out of the car that we could today. Carlos got caught up in a lap 1 incident, which unfortunately cost quite a bit in terms of performance. We were able to rectify that with a front wing change at the stop, which proved to be the right decision, enabling him to come back and fight in the second half of the race.

With Alex, it was a solid performance all weekend and he didn't put a foot wrong. We know we've fallen back relative to the field. There's a long way to go in the season, and the key is to make sure that we rectify the mistakes we suffered across the winter, so that we can continue to add performance to the car."