A look back: Singapore

Remembering Albono’s previous trips to the Marina Bay Street Circuit

Published

19 Sep 2024

Est Reading Time

3 min

Alex will be looking to go one better than his previous visit to Singapore, when he takes to the Marina Bay Street Circuit this weekend.

AA23 finished in P11 at last year’s edition, coming agonisingly close to placing within the points.

In fact, it was only a late collision that stopped Albono from battling for a top-ten spot.

Having qualified in P14, Alex made a clean getaway in the Garden City, before taking the opportunity to pit on Lap 20 when a safety car was deployed.

After overtaking Valtteri Bottas and Kevin Magnussen, our Thai racer then climbed two places when Max Verstappen and Sergio Pérez made their respective stops.

And a virtual safety car on Lap 44 further boosted Alex’s prospects, after he changed onto fresh tyres while sitting in P12.

More progress was made as Zhou Guanyu and Nico Hülkenberg were passed in successive laps but — with Albono in tenth place — things went awry in the race’s closing stages.

An ambitious move on AA23 by Pérez caused a collision with four laps remaining, resulting in a fall down the rankings to P13.

Though Alex was able to gain two places before the chequered flag, it ultimately proved to be a case of ‘so near but yet so far’ in Singapore.

“It should have been P8 today,” Alex said after the race.

“We were running in a good position and had a great strategy.

“We did expect a safety car to come in around that period and we saved the new Medium set of tyres for that situation, which paid dividends in the race.

“We had a really good evening, we were coming up through the pack and were getting close to Liam [Lawson].

“We most likely needed a couple more laps to get past him but then I had contact with Checo [Pérez] after he went for, in my opinion, a very optimistic manoeuvre and that was me out of the points.”

Albono will wish for greater fortune at the Marina Bay Street Circuit this time around, when he will be hoping for a repeat of his P6 finish there with Red Bull Racing in 2019.

His 2022 stint in Singapore was also eventful, but for very different reasons, as he returned to action after a bout of particularly severe appendicitis a few weeks earlier.

Having missed the Italian Grand Prix, Alex ended up in intensive care after suffering respiratory failure following complications from laparoscopic surgery — but made a remarkable recovery after a 48-hour stay in hospital.

“It's quite a tricky one because you're basically waiting for your lungs to recover,” he said at the time.

“And at the same time your body can't move as well as it normally can.

“You can't just jump back into normal training, you have to slowly build it up. We really started to push it last Monday. I treated training and recovery like a 9-to-5 job.

“Day by day it was getting better. Truthfully, we didn't think Singapore was on the cards, but with the speed of the recovery, it definitely became possible.”