This was far from the first setback of Albon’s career. For many years, he had struggled to keep things on track.
Born to a British father – former racing driver Nigel Albon – and a Thai mother, he’d been a Red Bull-backed driver early in his career, but lost their support after an indifferent season in Formula Renault in 2012, caused by a major personal upheaval.
His mum Kankamol – with whom he is particularly close – was jailed for fraud, leaving a 15-year-old Albon to look after his younger brother and three sisters.
He still doesn’t like to talk about it. But in the first series of Netflix’s Drive to Survive series, he admitted it was “by far the hardest year I’ve had in my life”, recalling how he “saw her get locked up and taken away”.
Albon says now the difficult road “helped” when it came to rebuilding his career.
“It’s just because I’ve gone through it,” he says. “I’ve had it before, personal stuff, as well as I had it in Formula Renault, where I wasn’t going to race the year after and we scrambled along and pretty much got a budget together within, like, two weeks of the first race.
“It seems like it’s worked out every single time. It sounds like I’m a gambling man, but, no, it’s just true ambition, and if you put your mind to it, it’s very cliched, but you can achieve your goals.”
In person, Albon is modest and unassuming. It’s hard to square such an apparently gentle character with the steel he must have required to get where he has.
“The general public get me wrong,” he says. “They think I’m this happy-go-lucky kid constantly, and that I’m not hungry; maybe too nice.
“They will never see the fiery side because they don’t have a headset. They don’t listen to me when I’m driving. I am naturally quite happy. I do love what I do. It’s the reason why I wanted to be in F1 so much. And I felt like I’ve learnt to enjoy and relax about it. But you definitely need a fiery side if you want to be in F1.”
I tell him that what got him to this point seems more like steel than fire, and he says: “It’s both. It’s the resilience and at the same time it’s determination.
“As a driver, you almost need to be a fighter. When you have a helmet on, you’re fighting other drivers. And I am fired up. I really am not a nice person when I have my helmet on. Speak to the engineers here and they’ll tell you that.”