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Alex Albon knows as well as any other Formula 1 driver what having a tough team-mate in the same car is like.
In fact doing so almost destroyed his F1 dream. He was sidelined by Red Bull for not measuring up well enough against Max Verstappen and almost couldn't find a way back onto the grid before Williams signed him up for 2022.
From his first season with Williams, he's been frustrated at having to do the lion's share of Williams's points-scoring. In fact, prior to this month's Azerbaijan Grand Prix, he'd scored 37 of the 42 points that Williams had scored in the last three seasons.
On the one hand, that's left him solely responsible for Williams's rise or fall up the constructors' table week-in, week-out. But on the other, it's left him as the undisputed team leader, buoyed by constant intra-team victories.
Albon's become accustomed to obliterating team-mates. Nicholas Latifi's sole qualifying 'victory' in 2022 was down to Albon’s brakes catching fire in Q1 at Silverstone while Logan Sargeant never beat Albon in 37 qualifying sessions.
That lack of competition was also going to change when Williams captured Carlos Sainz, a fellow ex-Verstappen team-mate who will want to supplant Albon as Williams's spearhead, for 2025.
But the fiercer intra-team competition has come quicker than expected with Franco Colapinto's sensational start to his surprise stand-in stint.
An unexpected challenge
Colapinto has put more pressure on Albon in three weekends than Sargeant did in 37. He was on Albon's pace at Monza but buckled under the pressure of his first qualifying session and was knocked out in Q1.
That decided the weekend but Colapinto didn't make the same mistake in Baku as he got through into Q3 and beat Albon, who was denied a final run by an airbox fan mishap. Given how close they were prior to Q3, it's debatable who'd have come out on top. He'd also recovered from the kind of FP1 crash that would have obliterated Sargeant's confidence all weekend.
Albon was the stronger driver in the race but Colapitno drove brilliantly to follow him home in eighth place, instantly scoring more points than Latifi and Sargeant managed combined alongside Albon.
Singapore proved Baku was no outlier and if anything, Colapinto took another step forward. He was just 0.007s shy of Albon in qualifying despite not having the suspension upgrade on his car nor DRS for one of the straights on his final lap.
But what he did on the opening lap one day later was arguably the greatest moment of his brief F1 career so far, sending his Wiliams FW46 down the inside of multiple cars at Turn 1, getting it stopped and still making the corner.
It wouldn't be hyperbolic to claim that's the boldest (legal) move a rookie has pulled since some of Verstappen's finest moves in 2015.
"There was a pretty nice gap and I went for it and it worked out," Colapinto explained.
You can tell how unexpectedly impressive it was by the reaction of those around him. "Franco just divebombed, what is he doing?" Albon fumed to Williams, while Sainz said Colapinto nearly took him and two others out.
Albon admitted upon reviewing after the race that there was "nothing to criticise" about Colapinto's move, he'd simply got the better of more experienced drivers.
But there's no escaping the fury over the radio - Albon also said after the race that losing four positions in that Turn 1 kerfuffle ruined his race more than the overheating power unit that ended it prematurely - showed a kind of frustration with a team-mate we've barely ever seen from Albon.
This is the first hint of the pressure that it's putting on Albon. Yes, he'd have been thinking about Williams's own tight championship battle, but he's a racing driver and in that moment he'd have just been frustrated that he'd been gazumped by his team-mate.
Given the way the race panned out with very little on-track overtaking in the midfield, Albon with an earlier pitstop probably would have beaten Colapinto, who was within sight of Sergio Perez's Red Bull for most of the second stint.
Colapinto did withhold from attacking Perez in the final few laps owing to heat exhaustion and visibly struggled to remove himself from his Williams after the race, but that's not uncommon for an experienced driver in Singapore, let alone an inexperienced one.
If Colapinto had an identical strategy to Albon, this really could have been his first proper head-to-head grand prix defeat by a team-mate in two years.
And that's going to give Albon plenty to think about in this coming autumn gap.
There's still a question mark over whether Colapinto can replicate this form across a string of more conventional tracks that the upcoming Austin-Mexico-Brazil triple-header will provide. But on the evidence of his brief F1 career so far, Colapinto is going to give Albon a real run for his money for the rest of 2024 before Sainz takes over the mantle.
Good news for Williams
While it's a big challenge for Albon, it's great news for Williams, which has emphatically improved its 2024 prospects with an already-vindicated bold in-season driver swap.
It sits eighth in the constructors' championship but a place in the top six - where it hasn't finished since 2017 - is within realistic reach, with an 18-point gap to RB in sixth and 15 points to make up on seventh-placed Haas.
Such a target wasn't realistic without the two points-scoring drivers it has now and having them pushing each other, and one picking up the points (or coming very close to them as Colapinto did in Singapore) when the other doesn't is going to make all the difference.
And it's also going to provide Williams - and the watching world - with some important answers on Albon.
A career-defining test
The next 12 months will tell us whether the new-and-improved Albon forged at Williams is worthy of a return to frontrunning machinery.
Through the many Albon heroics - and there have been many over the last three years, as evidenced by him placing 10th and sixth in the last two editions of The Race's top 10 drivers of the season - there's always been the caveat of not having a competitive team-mate alongside him.
That may have placed one doubt in the minds of frontrunning teams when considering their future driver line-ups.
Albon has a long-term contract with Williams but you'd have to imagine, should there be movement among the top teams, he'd be a top candidate to fill a vacancy. In fact, it's no surprise even a Red Bull return was mooted before he put pen to paper with Williams earlier this year, such is the transformation Albon has made from the driver who was effectively an out-of-depth rookie alongside Verstappen.
Don't underestimate Albon's renewed mental resolve. He's far from the same driver who was being battered by Verstappen every weekend in 2020 in particular. Williams is his team and it's going to take a lot for someone else to wrestle control of it from him.
Should he rise to the challenge of Colapinto and, more importantly, Sainz's arrival next year, Albon will prove he's ready to spearhead either a resurgent Williams or join an existing frontrunning team.
Even if it's come much earlier than expected, the 28-year-old is facing exactly the kind of crunch time he needs if he's to prove himself once and for all.
