Alex Albon in need of "straightforward, boring weekend" - Red Bull team boss Christian Horner

Red Bull

Albon in need of "straightforward, boring weekend" - Horner

Driver has been plagued by issues and incidents this season

Ian Parkes

Tuesday 4 August 2020 11:33

Red Bull team principal Christian Horner believes Alex Albon needs "a straightforward, boring weekend" for his driver to regain his confidence.

Following a stellar second half of the 2019 season after his promotion from Toro Rosso, Albon has endured one problem after another at each of the four weekends so far this campaign.

Across the British Grand Prix weekend, Albon was involved in a crash in FP2 and then encountered technical difficulties with the RB16 in FP3, both of which compromised his qualifying as he again failed to make it into Q3.

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In the race, Albon collected a five-second penalty for shunting Haas' Kevin Magnussen off track at the end of the first lap, and for long periods ran last before staging a late recovery to finish eighth.

Although far from enamoured with the penalty, Horner feels Albon at least ended the race positively, but now simply requires a weekend out of the spotlight

"For me, that was a racing incident," remarked Horner regarding the Magnussen collision. "If you look at it from the beginning, Kevin made a mistake, he got out of ride and Alex put his nose in there and then backed out of it a little bit.

"It was one of those things. I wasn’t too surprised with the penalty, it could’ve gone either way.

"But then I thought his recovery from there was excellent. We’ve seen it on numerous occasions, his ability to come back through the field, and his pace in the race was very good.

"We just need to have a straightforward, boring weekend for him. But I thought, again, he drove a very strong grand prix."

Asked whether such form over the closing stages will serve as a confidence booster going into this weekend's second race at Silverstone, the 70th Anniversary Grand Prix, Horner added: "I think so.

"I hope with the ability to come and run the weekend here again effectively this weekend, I’m sure he’ll make progress from there. I was very pleased with his performance."

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