Albon on Verstappen: "I beat Max in the world championship"

6 January 2022 at 09:56

Last update 6 January 2022 at 12:03

GPblog.com

Max Verstappen 's teammates sometimes seem to come off the assembly line. One of his teammates who was demoted by Red Bull Racing is Alexander Albon. Yet there was also a time when he could handle the Dutchman, as he tells the MotorsportMagazine podcast.

The Thai-British driver talks about his time in the KF3 karting championship, where he competed for victories with the likes of Max Verstappen, Charles Leclerc and George Russell. "In 2010, I beat Max in the world championship. As a result, I went from KF3 straight to KF1 and was more or less the reference for the Intrepid Driver Program," he says. "There were so many drivers, so I told them who was fast."

Important switch for Albon

Verstappen was one of them. In 2011, the Dutchman joined the Intrepid Driver Program. The following year he moved up from the KF3 to the KF2 class, where he won almost all the championships.

Albon became part of the Red Bull junior program in 2012, after which he started driving Formula Renault. "At that switch from karts, things got serious," the Williams driver explains. "From then on I was invited to meetings in Milton Keynes with Helmut Marko and Christian Horner."