Williams experienced a season first on Saturday, as both Alexander Albon and Franco Colapinto advanced into Q3 during qualifying.
They followed that with another first for the 2024 Formula 1 season, their initial double-points result.
Albon finished seventh and Colapinto eighth in the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, giving the team their initial double-points result of the year, and ten points on the afternoon. The result propelled Williams ahead of Alpine and into eighth place in the F1 Constructors’ Championship.
Following the race, the key figures praised the result.
“We decided to split strategy between the cars today to keep our options open as Baku is many times an incident rich race,” described Sven Smeets, the team’s Sporting Director, in Williams’ post-race report. “The race started well for us, and we pitted Franco who started on the Medium tyre. As [Fernando] Alonso had pitted this freed up Alex who started on the Hard and he showed some great pace in his stint.
“When he started to struggle with his tires, we pitted him a bit earlier than planned onto the Medium. After overtaking [Nico] Hulkenberg and Franco, he started to chase Alonso who was a few seconds ahead of him. He came close to Alonso but a few laps before the end the Medium started to struggle so we decided to make sure we could go to the end with the tire,” continued Smeets. “Franco did a great job keeping [Lewis] Hamilton and [Oliver] Bearman behind and, when a struggling Hulkenberg in front of him touched the wall, it brought Franco into the points.
“We were settling for P9 and P10 until a late accident between [Sergio] Perez and [Carlos] Sainz moved us up to P7 and P8,” added the Williams Sporting Director. “This was a great afternoon for the whole team; we’ve been competitive the whole weekend and have been rewarded with our first double points finish since last season’s U.S. Grand Prix. Now we are looking forward to going to Singapore where we hope to bring the next upgrade to the car.”
Albon called the result “luxurious” in his post-race comments.
“We know how difficult it is to get P9’s and P10’s in races, so to get P7 and P8 is luxurious and we’ll take that! We’ve moved in front of Alpine now in the championship, which was our target by the end of the year. It shows we’ve made good progress with the upgrade,” said Albon. “It’s another weekend when we’ve been similar to the Aston on pace and we’ve scored points for the second race in a row. We were much quicker than we expected to be compared to the top teams and it was nice to be in that fight. Let’s see next week but, for this weekend, it’s been strong.”
Colapinto, having secured his first points in F1 on his first stint in Baku as a driver at any level, indicated he was “delighted” with the result.
“To score my first points in Formula 1 is a fantastic feeling. I’m so proud of this team for what we’ve already been able to achieve together. I’m delighted to have points on the board to show for all the hard work and effort we’ve been putting in with it only being my second race. We had good pace today being very close to the Aston,” said the rookie driver. “To finish seventh and eighth alongside Alex means we’re now P8 in the Constructors’ Championship which is a good step forward and a motivator for the team. We still need to keep learning and improving together as it’s a long season with many races left. I’m looking forward to racing in Singapore for the first time next weekend.”