New Williams package follows Red Bull concept

Albon’s car will be fitted with a major package of floor and bodywork changes from the start of practice on Friday.

Meanwhile, Nicholas Latifi will have a standard car, enabling the Grove team to run a proper back-to-back comparison through the weekend.

“It’s an interesting weekend for us, we haven’t had major upgrades for a while,” Albon said when asked about the changes by Autosport. “And, of course, it’s going to look visibly different.

“It should perform, hopefully, a bit better than the previous package we had. So, only time will tell, we have some running to do. We need to get on top of the balance as quickly as we can, and try and get into the weekend hitting the ground running.

“I think what you’ll see is it’ll look more towards what the rest of the grid looks like. I think as you’ve seen, everyone’s been going towards a certain concept. I think, as we know, everyone started a bit different. And it’s either the kind of the Ferrari concept, or the Red Bull concept, that seems to be adopted.

“Our one looks more like the Red Bull car, but I wouldn’t call it a like for like. It’s the direction that we’ve headed into. You’ll see in FP1.

“But you know, there is a lot of work. I mean, this is a big update, there aren’t many things on the car that have the same part as last weekend, two weeks ago. So it’s pretty good.”

There were suggestions on social media this week that the changes to the FW44 could be worth up to a second a lap.

However, Albon insisted that it wasn’t possible for anyone to make a judgement on numbers before the revised car hits the track.

“That would be a very good update!,” he smiled. “It’s hard to say what we’ll do, I think the second, if we took that we would be very, very happy. But yeah, truthfully, speaking until we drive the car, we won’t really know.

“And I think what you’ll see is, especially on Friday, is us trying to figure out how to deal with the car and see what we can do in terms of ride height windows and balance tuning, whatever it may be, because we might end up on Friday with a very different car, and it will take a bit of time to get used to. And maybe not even this weekend, it might take a bit more than that.

“So yeah, there’s no numbers on it. I think it would be silly to do that. But we obviously are hoping for a good improvement. But until Friday, obviously, the whole team, myself, we’re itching to get out…