Formula 1’s not meant to be easy but Alex Albon’s making the task of keeping his Red Bull seat hard for himself.
In his fight for job security Albon has edged closer, fallen away, and edged closer again in a turbulent year.
While the scrutiny over his future may seem unrelenting and unwarranted, he occupies a race-winning seat and Red Bull’s call for him to “justify” his position a few races ago has been met by a string of mistakes.
Crashing heavily in second practice for the Bahrain Grand Prix only continues that.
Alex Albon hits the barriers hard in FP2 – bringing out the red flags in Bahrain 💥 😮#BahrainGP 🇧🇭 #F1 pic.twitter.com/ONR1ER1cPO
— Formula 1 (@F1) November 27, 2020
It’s obvious Red Bull sorely wants Albon to prove he should stay. He’s well thought of within the team. If it wanted to drop him, it would have done so by now.
Facing a much hinted at ‘deadline’ to convince Red Bull before Turkey, Albon made crucial errors in both races leading up to that cut-off and failed to score any points.
But he was then given to the end of the season, as clear a ‘please just give us any reason to keep you’ gesture as Red Bull could have communicated.
Then he had a costly spin in Turkey after showing win-challenging pace for a good chunk of the grand prix.
But the hope was this would be the trigger for a strong run-in, and that Albon had finally found confidence in a car that’s been difficult for him to tame.
That’s what makes Friday’s crash a shame because he seemed to be throwing the car around quite comfortably. The FP2 shunt occurred after running wide and misjudging how much he could keep his foot in on the run-off. Any good momentum has been disrupted in a bad way.
At the risk of reading too much into Friday practice, there was already a slightly worrying hint of Albon continuing a recent trend of comparing well to Verstappen in FP1 but failing to match his team-mate’s progress as the track evolves.
Albon was quick in FP1 in Portugal and Turkey, where the track was extremely low grip. He then fell further away from Max Verstappen as the weekend progressed.
Cooler conditions and even a few drops of rain meant Bahrain’s daytime practice session was in unusual conditions as well, and Albon found himself in Verstappen’s company again.
But neither of his push laps on the soft tyre in FP2 were looking stunning, even before the shunt.
Often Albon seems to struggle because he lacks the confidence and control to lean on the car with a wayward rear. It could be that when there’s a more fundamental limitation for everyone because of a lack of track grip, then his struggles aren’t isolated and he’s more competitive.
Maybe that is just coincidence. Maybe the crash will just be an annoying setback and nothing more. Maybe he will hit the track in FP3 and, confidence restored, hustle the car to the sort of qualifying and race performances Red Bull does believe he’s capable of.
That might explain his surprisingly relaxed response to what Horner called a “frustrating” and expensive crash.
Albon said “it was just one of them things” and “not fun but all good”.
Perhaps that approach is part of trying to avoid spiralling – after all, while this incident is the opposite of giving Red Bull a reason to keep him, it is also only practice.
He needs to hit back over the rest of the weekend and make sure that’s all it is.
Otherwise this is the latest in a line of costly errors since Red Bull challenged him to justify his place, and his career prospects will surely be fatally wounded.
