Alex Albon explains team radio rant in Japanese GP

Alex Albon has shed some light on the technical issue that was a cause of much frustration for him in the Japanese Grand Prix.

Albon repeatedly complained about a gearbox problem over team radio at Suzuka, as he struggled to shift the gears up in the way he wanted to.

“These shifts are so bad. What have we done to them? It’s been ***. At the start, it’s being *** now,” he said in a message that was broadcast on the world feed.

The Anglo-Thai driver also appeared to be unhappy with Williams’ strategy, as he said: “Honestly, you guys make absolutely no sense”.

When informed Haas rival Oliver Bearman had already stopped for fresh tyres, he replied "yeah, pit before then".

Alex Albon explains F1 Japanese Grand Prix radio exchange

Speaking afterwards, Albon elaborated on his animated messages over team radio

 “I think it was a boring race because my radio was clearly a hot topic," he told F1's official website.

In an interview with Sky TV, he added: “That is honestly me in the car. If you had my radio [all the time], you would hear more like that than not like that.”

Albon later revealed that he was unhappy with the gear shift settings chosen for the race, having felt the team had gone backwards in this regard through the weekend.

This suggests that there was no underlying hardware problem with the gearbox itself.

He battled through technical gremlins to finish ninth in the race, scoring two important points for Williams.

“We had a couple of shift [setting] that we've been testing all weekend and we settled on one that we were quite happy with, but it didn't feel like the one that we settled on that part of the race,” he said.

“It felt a little bit like what we were driving with an FP1 and FP2, which I wasn't too happy with. Then we made some changes and fixed that.”

The ninth-place finish ensured Albon continued his points-scoring streak at the start of the 2025 season.

The 29-year-old sits a strong seventh in the championship standings, ahead of even Ferrari’s Lewis Hamilton.

Williams holds fifth place in the teams’ standings, with Albon having scored all but one point out of the team’s tally of 19.