Five fast facts from the 2023 Australian Grand Prix

Sunday’s Australian Grand Prix was a tough day at the office for Williams Racing after many positive indications of what the FW45 was capable of on Friday and Saturday.

We're already looking forward to Baku for the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, where Alex Albon and Logan Sargeant will hope to bounce back from events in Melbourne.

Before we switch all our focus to the future though, here are five fast facts from the weekend just leaving our rearview mirror.

The Albert Park Circuit wasn't ever known for being a high-speed track, but its revised layout that debuted last year, with the extra DRS zone, has changed everything.

The FW45 found so much time in that fast middle sector that Albono's qualifying efforts had him repeatedly going purple there — i.e. setting the fastest time of anyone — on his super Saturday.

Sarge was speedy, too, setting the race's third-highest recorded speed at 332.9 km/h in Sector 2, only behind Esteban Ocon and Sergio Perez.

As our No23 familiarises himself with our season's challenger, he reached Q3 for the first time in 2023, beating out all our midfield rivals with a P8 qualification.

That marks Albon's best qualifying result with us and his highest qualifying position outside his time racing at Red Bull.

However, the Thai driver has started a race with Williams Racing higher up the order before, with a P6 start in Belgium last year after grid penalties nudged him forward after an initial P9 qualifying time.

Logan might have been the only Williams Racing driver that came to the pit box for additional sets of Pirelli rubber on Sunday, but he still kept our crew busy.

The Lap 1 safety car saw our strategists jump on the clever opportunity to pit our American racer twice in successive laps to open up the chance of possibly repeating Albono's tyre-whispering heroics of last year.

The one-lap running of the yellow-walled mediums would have been enough to allow Logan not to swap tyres in a straightforward race without safety cars or red flags.

As we now know, the 2023 Australian Grand Prix was the opposite of straightforward, and with the red flags plus conventional pit stops, Sarge ran six sets of tyres in the Grand Prix, the joint-highest of any runner, to keep our pit crew busy.

The multiple red flag stoppages elongated the Grand Prix into a 17:37 local time finish in Melbourne, perilously close to the 18:12 sunset.

As the autumn sun lowered in the Australian sky, so did the track temperatures, with shadows appearing on the circuit and spectators zipping up their jumpers and coats.

We saw the mercury swing from a 34.6°C track temperature at lights out to a low of 23.8°C when the chequered flag fell two and a half hours later.

It's only Logan's third F1 race, and he's already part of the sport's history, participating in a record-breaking round.

With the late-race double red flag stoppages on Laps 55 and 57, the 2023 Australian Grand Prix's three red flags mark it as the most-stopped race in F1's 73 years.

Although becoming more commonplace in the sport in recent years, the 1981 Belgian Grand Prix was the only race prior to 2014 that had two red flag periods.

The only other races with over one red flag stoppage are the 2014 Japanese GP, the 2016 Brazilian GP, the 2020 Tuscan GP, the 2021 Saudi Arabian GP, and now, of course, this past weekend's Australian GP.