Dutch GP: Difficult race for Atlassian Williams F1 Team
By Williams F1 Team
August 24 2026
The 2026 Dutch GP would turn out to be a difficult one for the Atlassian Williams F1 Team with once again, despite some early encouraghing pace, the team continues to suffer from an uncompetitive FW48. For Alex Albon and Carlos Sainz it was a race that would unfortunately see the pair make contact going into T1 as Alex was trying to pass Carlos. This would see damage to Alex's car which would see him forced to pit. He would be classified as 17th while Carlos would continue to be 16th. Very much a race that I suspect the team will want to move on from very quickly.
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Atlassian Williams F1 Team
Dutch GP Race Review |
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Alex Albon:
"In clean air the car felt good today, not far off the midfield
pace, so there are positives to take. The moment with Carlos was just
one of those racing incidents – we were going for the same corner and he
locked up. It's not how we wanted to end the weekend, and not what the
team needs, but it is what it is and we'll discuss together as we always
do.
We need to review our strategy today as we were fighting
Fernando and he finished ahead – I think we pitted too early on the
first stop, reacting to a potential undercut rather than running our own
race. That left us catching a lot of blue flags and stuck in dirty air,
which made my second stint messy. We'll review everything as a team and
look forward to a cleaner weekend in Monza." |
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Carlos Sainz:
"First of all, sorry to Alex and the team for the contact at the
end of the race. I had very worn hard tyres and braked over the bump in
turn 1, locked up and couldn’t stop the car in time. It was obviously
the last thing I wanted to end an already tough weekend. Again,
apologies to him and the team.
Overall, we struggled to get into
a good rhythm throughout the weekend and had to run a number of tests to
explore the issues we were having, which put us on the backfoot and
meant we weren't able to fight for any more today. The positive is that
we've found some solutions and have good learnings to take forward to
the upcoming races, so we'll look to come back stronger in Monza." |
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James Vowles, Team Principal:
"Tough day. I was hoping the weather would stay for longer, as I
think we could've had an interesting race in those mixed conditions but
unfortunately, not meant to be.
We don't have the car pace. We
need to make sure that we bring performance to the car, efficiently and
quickly, however that won't be for a few races.
Whilst our cars
came together, we put Carlos in a tricky situation of being on very used
tyres, and for us, whether we're fighting for 14th or points, we want to
make sure we give it the same level of tenacity and determination.
Unfortunately, we accumulated a bit of damage this weekend, so we need
to use the break before Monza to get back on top of that." |
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Circuit Zandvoort, Netherlands
| 4.259km |
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Pos |
Driver |
Summary |
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16 |
C Sainz |
• Started: P17 • Fastest
lap: 1:17.328 |
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17 |
A Albon |
• Started: P16 • Fastest
lap: 1:17.147 |
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