Albon gets the changes requested by Gasly
In difficulties since the beginning of the season, Alex Albon has changed his race engineer. This was requested by Pierre Gasly when he was in the same situation last year.
In the lead-up to the Silverstone Grand Prix, Red Bull announced that Alex Albon would be getting a new race engineer, Simon Reenie. Reenie held this position alongside Daniel Ricciardo until the end of the 2018 season. Since then, he had chosen not to travel and to remain at the Milton Keynes headquarters.
But the results are not there for Alex Albon at the start of the season. Although he could have contended for the victory in the first race, it remains an exception during a season start that has seen him go off track on numerous occasions. The issue arises particularly during qualifying since it has been two sessions in a row where he has been unable to advance to Q3, while Max Verstappen classified third.
This is reminiscent of Pierre Gasly’s situation at the beginning of last season. Except that Red Bull’s response was quite different, with a harsh replacement after the summer break, following open criticism in the media by Christian Horner and Helmut Marko.
With the Thai driver, on the contrary, everything is done to explain that it’s the car that is unstable, that the team must do what’s necessary to give him confidence, which resulted in this change of engineer. This is exactly what Pierre Gasly was asking for last year: « Last year, I arrived at Red Bull with one year of experience. So I had very little F1 experience. I knew I was fast, but I would have liked to have someone by my side with a bit more experience rather than someone who was also new to F1. »
If he did not get his way and was relegated to Toro Rosso (now AlphaTauri), he was able to prove that he had the level to turn things around. And today’s changes in his former team prove him right: « I think what Red Bull is doing right now is a very good thing because these are the changes I wanted at the time. If they are doing it, it’s because they think it’s the right thing to do. I know why we weren’t competitive but I don’t know exactly why Alex is struggling. »
At present, there is no question of reversing the roles once again. The nationality of the driver, which is the same as that of the energy drink’s co-shareholder, certainly works in his favor. But for how long?
With the participation of RacingBusiness.fr
