Albon can't resist cheeky Red Bull jab: 'Everyone's been fired at this point'

As Formula 1 headed into the summer break, Alexander Albon featured in the latest episode of F1‘s Grill the Grid, where he couldn’t resist taking a light-hearted swipe at his former team, Red Bull.

While the Formula 1 paddock enjoys its summer break, the drivers have swapped racing for a different kind of competition in the latest edition of Grill the Grid. The popular series puts the entire grid through a range of entertaining challenges, with points awarded across multiple episodes. In the newest episode, the task was to work out the identity of Formula 1 drivers, past and present, by looking at the teams they have raced for throughout their careers.

When it was the Williams driver’s turn to identify the driver who had raced for just two teams, Toro Rosso and Red Bull, Max Verstappen did not immediately come to mind. Instead, Albon came out with a joke that left those around him laughing.

“I was like, ‘There’s no driver that had this. Everyone’s been fired at this point,'” he said, joking about Red Bull’s long history of drivers, himself included, who were eventually dropped after only a few months because their performances were not considered good enough.

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Williams will have to look elsewhere for Alex Albon’s next race engineer after missing out on Tom Hart. Speaking to GPblog at the Hungaroring, the Thai-British driver revealed the team had targeted Hart before he opted to remain with Red Bull, where he is expected to replace Gianpiero Lambiase on Max Verstappen’s side of the garage.

The search comes as James Urwin prepares to step away from his current trackside duties and transition into a factory-based role within Williams. Albon explained that the team has already drawn up a shortlist of possible replacements and that he has been involved in the process of identifying candidates. While Hart was one of the names Williams hoped to secure, the move never materialised, leaving the Grove outfit to continue its search ahead of next season.

“We obviously went for Tom, I think Tom’s a great guy, a great engineer, but we’ve also got ideas in place. James, my current race engineer, he’s going to go more towards a factory-based role, which I think he’s going to be amazing at, and for us it’s now just trying to find someone who we can kind of take that process on take the engineering role from James next year.

“Of course, we have a few people in mind, but yes, I think every person that we’ve kind of gone out to is someone I’ve also been involved with. We kind of had a list of people on our roster of ‘who do we want to get?’ Of course, Tom was someone that I saw as a name and I thought, ‘yeah, Tom’s great.'”