Alex Albon says the 2024 Formula 1 season feels like a "missed opportunity" for Williams as it dropped to ninth in the standings.
Williams started the season on the back foot with an overweight FW46, and while a lot of effort went into taking the weight out again, that also impacted its update schedule. The Grove-based team only added one significant two-part update to the car right after the summer break.
That gave Williams a brief window of competitiveness in the midfield before rival teams edged ahead again, with a range of costly operational errors and crashes further denting the team's chances to move up.
Albon feels the team should have scored many more points at the start of the campaign, something that could have given it a realistic chance to fight Alpine, Haas and RB, which could have been possible with a car that had been launched on the weight limit rather than significantly above it.
"My general opinion is a feeling of a little bit of a missed opportunity," he said. "It's easy to focus on the latter end of the season and the crashes, but realistically we started with an overweight car. We should have scored many more points at the beginning of the year.
"We had one upgrade, which was a good upgrade, and we kind of had a middle part of the season that was respectable. The plan was always to focus on next year early and at that point a lot of teams overtook us.
"So, if we had started off a bit stronger, like what the Astons did, had a peakier beginning and trailed off at the end, we would still have had a solid season, but we didn't.
"I think our best period was in that middle of the season; Monza, Baku, kind of Singapore, that was where our car was performing well, and now everyone's kind of caught up. But we've also just had a lot of bad luck and a lot of issues, a lot of crashes to be fair.
"But in many ways, I feel like it's more of a missed opportunity at the beginning of the year than anything else."
For Albon, Williams' bruising 2024 campaign is easier to take on the chin given the plans team boss James Vowles has laid out to move the team out of its current plight for 2026 and beyond.
"In the end, I'm not too upset. I'm not here for short-term success. I'm here for the long term, so I'm happy with it," he added.
"Team principals can talk, but I think it's quite obvious the setbacks we've had this year. We've been quite public about it, and I think James is very honest with where we are, showing you the direction and the steps back that we're having to make in some places to get into a better place for the future.
"He's very honest with me as well, very open with me, and we have this open dialogue. Maybe it is taking a bit longer than we wanted to, but I'm glad we have the aspirations to not just be fighting the forward end of the midfield. We want more than that, so we are continuously sacrificing just to get the upgrades."
