Alex Albon has taken full responsibility for a first-lap collision with Haas driver Ollie Bearman at the British Grand Prix, an incident that ended his race and capped a pointless home weekend for Williams at Silverstone.
Albon locked up on the opening lap and crashed into Bearman’s Haas, forcing an immediate pit stop for a new front wing. A subsequent time penalty for causing the collision sealed his fate, and Williams converted the remaining laps into a data-gathering exercise for their newly introduced upgrades.
“My mistake,” Albon said after the race. “I think I had a bad start and locked up basically. It happens, unfortunately kind of ruined the race and then we started to box and test the new front wing out a little bit and do some stuff we wouldn’t normally have time to do on a normal race weekend.”
The 30-year-old now has three DNFs and one DNS through the opening rounds of the 2026 season. “Sums up the season so far, yeah, just need a smooth one basically. This one was on me, this race, Lap 1 wasn’t good enough, but we’ll look to come back stronger,” Albon added.
On the other side of the Williams garage, Carlos Sainz fared little better. The Spaniard finished 17th after a late penalty dropped him further down the order. Despite strong race starts throughout the season, Sainz has consistently lacked the car pace to maintain early gains.
“Unfortunately, very good starts this year pretty much every race but we don’t have the pace to hold onto those positions,” Sainz said. “In the end, you always end up falling back to the place of the car in Quali, which is 14th, 15th. Disappointing day, disappointing weekend as we expected a lot more from this new package that we brought here.”
Williams arrived at Silverstone with a new front wing as the centerpiece of a modest upgrade package, with a larger development set expected soon. The upgrades, however, failed to deliver the anticipated performance gains at their home circuit.
Sainz expressed growing frustration with the team’s development trajectory, noting that Williams — who topped the midfield last year — have rarely been in contention for points this season. “We are very far away from the points, very far away from the Racing Bulls, which is a car in my opinion that this year we should have been targeting to beat,” he said. “A lot to think about, a lot to consider, a lot of questions to be asked about how we are developing this car as in my mind we don’t seem to be finding any performance.”
The race at Silverstone was won by Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc, who ended a personal win drought and delivered the Scuderia’s 16th victory at the historic British venue.