Negativity during Red Bull time made Albon 'mentally devastated'
F1 News
- Toby McLuskie
No doubt, for many, being a Formula 1 driver is the absolute dream job: fast cars, beautiful women, money, prestige and status. Yet practice can be more unruly, especially if your performance is not as hoped. Alexander Albon has experienced this. During his time at Red Bull Racing, he was outstripped by Max Verstappen, resulting in a lot of negativity around his person.
It was the 2020 season that gave Albon a chance alongside Verstappen. "I was struggling," the Thai looks back in the podcast High Performance. "I think, I was struggling with the attention around it, and, of course, I deleted all my socials and got away from the social media side of things. I think Formula 1 itself is a whole different topic, with the new generation, the new fanbase that comes with it is very different but it was quite toxic truthfully"
Albon noticed that during that period, the comments on Instagram and Twitter, for example, were very mean-spirited. He argues that he was portrayed as "the laughing stock" of Formula 1. Although the Thai did try to ignore all this as much as possible, completely shutting himself off from the negativity did not work. For example, on the Thursdays before a Grand Prix, when Albon and his colleagues are obliged to talk to the press.
"And so the questions you get, ‘you’re not performing, who do you think could replace you?’ or ‘this driver is performing, what do you think about him?’ or ‘why are you struggling’? and these kinds of things. As much as you ignore it, you can’t. You actually can’t because on a Thursday you figure out what everyone has been saying," Albon said.
Albon managed to recover
Completely blocking all the criticism was difficult, so Albon looked for another way to deal with it. "It’s just noise at the end of the day. I think as I understood that it’s just noise, I felt, this sounds strange to say… the more I was self-aware about it, as long as I had my core routes and core feelings of where I’m at and the progress I’m making and the areas I’m working on, it really stopped getting to me at some point. It just got to a point where it kind of plateaued and I just started to focus on myself, to be honest."
Albon hired a psychologist and meanwhile started working hard with his trainer to get better as a driver. "I was quite lucky where I had a year away from the spot so as the negativity grew and grew and grew, by the end of the year I’d kind of got to the point where I was flat. I was just destroyed mentally and didn’t have much motivation. As I had the year away, this noise stopped quite quickly," says Albon, who eventually grew into a highly regarded F1 driver more in the relative lee with Williams.