Report: Solid start in Suzuka

Alex and Carlos showed progress as the Japanese GP weekend kicked off

Published

27 MAR 2026

Est. reading time

2 min

Two hours of Friday running at the famed Suzuka Circuit saw the Atlassian Williams Formula 1 team clock up the miles under sunny Japanese skies.

A mighty effort to complete 108 laps between Alex Albon and Carlos Sainz has given the team plenty of data to work with for tomorrow’s qualifying and Sunday’s race.

Our best time of the day ended with Alex, grabbing a 1:31.496 in FP2, while Carlos took a 1:31.608 in Friday’s second session.

That ended our duo’s day in P8 and P13, improving on the FP1, where Carlos led Alex in P17 and P18, respectively.

Carlos’ time of a 1:33.383 beat Alex by three-tenths, with Albono setting a 1:33.697 in the morning session.

It wasn’t an entirely problem-free day, however. Alex briefly stopped out on track in FP1 before continuing on, and later made contact with Sergio Perez.

Nonetheless, there were positives to takes from the laps logged and times set in a session where several of our rivals spent large amounts of time in their garages with mechanical gremlins.

Experience a race weekend like a true VIP!

You plus a friend could be our star guests in the 305.

Enter now

Alex Albon:

“That’s Friday done with. I think more of a positive day today than the last two weekends. We have to be realistic in that I think that’s probably a bit stronger than where we’re going to be tomorrow, but at least on the positive side the car is feeling better. We’ve corrected some issues and, also with setup, we’ve found something a bit more interesting in FP2. We’re chipping away and going in the right direction.”

Carlos Sainz:

“It was tough to get everything out of the car today but we had decent pace in the short runs during FP2. We seem to be more competitive over one lap, but we’re struggling with race pace in the high fuel runs. Tonight, we’ll look at what we can change with the setup to find some performance and hope to make some progress before Qualifying.”

Angelos Tsiaparas, Chief Engineer:

“Overall a very productive Friday. We got through most of our programmes and there were some very interesting test items as well that arguably helped move us forward, and we made a few setup changes between FP1 and FP2 which moved us in the right direction. We are starting to understand the car a bit better now we are at the third race and how to extract the maximum potential out of it, and we will see in Qualifying whether that moves us up the competitive order.”

Race Special

Latest

Alex on his Suzuka Friday

Alex Albon explained how his first day on track in Japan went

ARTICLE

—

27 MAR 2026