Would Red Bull be interested in an Albon return?

Dutch Grand Prix

Venue: Zandvoort Dates: 29-31 August Race start: 14:00 BST on Sunday

Formula 1’s summer break is nearly over with the season resuming with the Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort this weekend.

Ten races remain in 2025 with Oscar Piastri holding a nine-point lead over McLaren team-mate Lando Norris at the top of the drivers’ championship.

Are Red Bull interested in getting Alex Albon back because his superiority over Carlos Sainz suggests he is as fast as Charles Leclerc? – Peter

This question raises all sorts of follow-ups about whether it is possible to compare drivers as they move around teams.

On the one hand, there is no other option, but sometimes there is no other conclusion than to think it can’t be that simple.

To take Sainz as an example, he was slightly quicker than Max Verstappen on average in qualifying when they were team-mates at Toro Rosso. He was a little slower than Nico Hulkenberg when they were teamed at Renault. He was pretty equal with Lando Norris at McLaren, and then slower again than Leclerc at Ferrari than he was Hulkenberg at Renault.

And now, at Williams so far, Sainz is on average a little slower than Albon, but slightly closer to him than he was on average to Leclerc.

Comparing just Sainz, Leclerc and Albon, then, yes, that suggests that Leclerc is the quickest, with Albon between him and Sainz.

But if all that is immutable, then it also means Verstappen is slower than Leclerc and only very slightly faster than Hulkenberg.

And how does that make any sense given Verstappen was more than 0.5secs quicker than Albon when they were driving the same car at Red Bull?

It gets even more confusing if you throw Daniel Ricciardo’s relative performances against many of those drivers into the mix.

That’s a roundabout way of saying that just because Albon has had the measure of Sainz so far at Williams, it doesn’t necessarily mean Red Bull would be interested in having him back.

Generally, unless a driver is a generational talent, how he does at a team is about more than just natural speed in a car set up ideally for him.

Other factors also come into the picture, such as the way he fits into the team, the way the car fits his natural driving style, how hard it is to adjust to the style the car demands, and so on.

At the same time, how Red Bull are going to operate in the driver market in the future is unknown at the moment, as Christian Horner has gone, and Laurent Mekies is now working alongside motorsport adviser Helmut Marko.

As the Belgian Grand Prix is set to be put on a rotation year-by-year, what track will Spa rotate with and may that venue even rotate? – Toby

This topic centres on two inter-related factors – the demand for new races, and the fact that European countries find it increasingly hard to find and/or justify the funds to pay for a grand prix.

Earlier this year, Formula 1 signed a new contract with Spa-Francorchamps that runs until 2031, but which does not include 2028 and 2030, when another race will appear on the calendar instead.

This is likely to be another European event. The prime candidates are other events in a similar situation.

For example, the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, which is losing the Spanish Grand Prix to Madrid but still has a slot on the calendar for next year, is interested in staying on the calendar beyond 2026.

Imola has already lost its slot next season and could be in a similar position in the future. Another name doing the rounds at the moment is Turkey.

With the power units being made simpler next year, will they generate more noise than presently (I accept they will never sound like they did up until 2013)? I consider it an embarrassment for the sport that the F3 cars (and Porsche Cup cars) that also race on the F1 weekends are louder than the main event – Raffi

The impression might be that the new engines being introduced next year should be louder because they will no longer have an MGU-H – the device that recovers energy from the turbo.

But I am told that while they might be a little louder than currently, they won’t be that different, because they still have turbos, which is the overriding impact on the sound.

As you may have read, there is a push from governing body the FIA at the moment to return F1 to older-style naturally aspirated engines, and that’s partly because of the noise.

Initially, this seems to have come from a whim of FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem, with influence from Bernie Ecclestone and Christian Horner, rather than a reasoned opinion based on thorough research of the desires of the audience.

However, it does chime with concerns that exist about how F1 will look next year because of the energy-recovery demands of the new engines, which have close to 50% of their total power output coming from the electrical part of the engine.

From what I’m told about fan surveys done by F1, there is no widespread agreement on whether louder engines would be a positive.

Some – like Raffi – obviously think they would be.

But the F1 fanbase has changed a lot in recent years, and inside the sport there is concern that newer members of the audience – more women and children now come to races, for example – would not welcome engines that made so much noise as to be virtually deafening, that made ear defenders an absolute necessity, that stopped people having a comfortable conversation when the race was on, etc. Likewise the guests in the corporate boxes.

Equally, city races such as Miami and Las Vegas would be threatened if the cars suddenly became much noisier than was promised to residents when discussions about the races took place.

It would highly likely revive the complaints that used to take place in Melbourne about this, too.

The world has moved on in many different ways since the first decade of this century, and it’s far from clear that effectively turning the clock back 20 or 30 years would be a good idea, even if it was with the addition of a token hybrid element to the engines and sustainable fuel.

Talks are ongoing on the future direction of engines from 2030 or so onwards, but they are a long way from reaching a conclusion.

The talk is all of tyres and climate conditions but do different circuits have different asphalt and does it impact on the tyre performance which ones are the most abrasive? – Derek

Yes, different F1 circuits have different track surfaces and, yes, it does have a major impact on tyre performance.

In simple terms, the smoother a surface, the less demand it makes of the tyres. A lot of the newly resurfaced tracks – such as Silverstone – have a high bitumen content in the asphalt, and that reduces the strain on the tyres, and with it overheating.

Think of the stones that make up the asphalt, and how much black stuff (bitumen) there is smoothing out the gaps between them – generally, the older the surface, the less bitumen, the more abrasiveness.

At Spa, there are even two different parts of the track – some of it was resurfaced before the 2024 grand prix, and some of it remains the old asphalt.

There is not space here to go through all the different track surfaces on the calendar. But one of the extremes of abrasiveness would be Bahrain, which has very old asphalt, and by consequence causes a lot of tyre overheating and degradation.

When a driver is asked to come into the pits, why do they say on the radio “box, box, box?” – David

This is to do with clarity of communication. “Box” is an easier word to understand clearly in the noisy and demanding environment of an F1 cockpit than “pit”.

“Box, box, box” is simply using the word three times to emphasise the urgency of the command.