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Alexander Albon says he will work to make gains over a single lap during the second week of pre-season testing in Barcelona.
The Thai-British driver is entering his second full season of F1, having secured a deal with Red Bull after he replaced Pierre Gasly at the team midway through the 2019 season.
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Despite scoring top-six finishes in all of his races but one since he joined the Milton Keynes-based team, he was a handful of tenths down on teammate Max Verstappen during qualifying at most events, with the average gap between them reading 0.433 in favour of the Dutchman.
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With three days of winter testing remaining before the start of the 2020 campaign, Albon is hoping to hone his one-lap pace in that time behind the wheel of the RB16.
“It is a place to work on, that’s what it’s about now,” Albon said. “I just to play around with some things and work on the areas. I know more or less the areas that need to be worked on so it’s just looking at the data, see where Max is quicker and get on it.”
Albon added that he appreciates having long days of testing which allows the team to figure out different aspects of the car, as time during grand prix weekends is limited.
”Yeah, I’ve still got three-ish days, depending on how you look at it,” he said. “But yeah definitely, these tests feel very different to doing FP1, FP2 because you have that stability in the programme.
“We’ve been playing around, we’ve found some things already which make the car feel nicer to drive. It’s having that freedom and time to test things that you wouldn’t really have to on a normal weekend.
“It’s good to do days by yourself if you’re comparing a lot of things because each driver has their own style.
“But at the same time, you can do a lot of efficient laps when you split the days. I think it was one of the first times they split the programme [on day three]. And Max and my comments are quite similar, it isn’t a big problem to split it.”
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Ram Samartha
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Classic psyche game and projection by Albon here. Now he has just signaled to all the other teams that RB will either be pushing, or not pushing and making the other teams think they will be so that the other teams will show their cards. Even though it's not until week 1 qualy that we see the rea... [Read more]