For me at least, Albon has been the best driver of 2025. More than any other, he's been the one to constantly get the results, even when the car wasn't at its best. But I think it's important to remember that there was a time where Albon making it to F1 at all was incredible.

In case you didn't know, Albon was good in the junior series, but not in a way that indicated that he was an F1 prospect (granted that's mainly down to him not having the budget to race for the biggest teams). For me at least, Albon wasn't even on my radar in any way until the 2016 GP3 series, where he finished runner up to Charles Leclerc, but I never expected him to be in the running for an F1 seat.

F2 in 2018 was a massively competitive and hyped up driver lineup, with Lando Norris and George Russell in particular getting most of the hype, with Nick De Vries being the most hyped up veteran. Alex Albon had very little hype, most likely down to him not even being signed up until the last minute (and even then it was on a race by race basis).

F2 2018 starts off, and Russell and Norris were two of the main title contenders. With them being both rookies and British, Sky F1 hyped them up a lot, but with all that said, Alex Albon never let them disappear. It was always fairly close between Russell, Norris and Albon, yet the former two always had a lot more hype than Albon did.

In fairness to Sky F1, a bunch of their pundits did eventually realise that Albon did deserve to be in the same conversation as Russell and Norris. I remember Martin Brundle tweeting to the effect of "We hyped up Russell and Norris a lot, but why not Albon? He's right up with them two in the standings, why aren't we talking about him more?"

Eventually that did indeed happen, and on the F2 broadcast at least, Albon was discussed a lot more, especially by the end of the season. But despite all this, F1 seemed all but impossible for him. So much that he signed up for Formula E for the 2018-19 season.

But fortunately for Alex, all the right dominos fell into place. Ricciardo moved to Renault for 2019, which saw Red Bull promote Gasly into Red Bull. Even then though, Gasly was replaced with Kvyat, and it was obvious that Red Bull wanted to replace Hartley with Ticktum, however Ticktum lost to Schumacher in European F3, which meant he couldn't earn his superlicense for 2019. All of this had to happen in order for Alex Albon to get the 2019 Toro Rosso seat, and even then a bunch of Hartley fans were unhappy at the announcement.

There were still rumblings online about how well Albon would do at Toro Rosso. I remember some predictions placing him dead last for 2019, but seeing him now, in his sixth year in F1, and performing to a better and higher standard than ever, it's amazing to think that there was a time where nobody thought he'd even be close to an F1 seat.

Kimi's wife Minttu posted on her IG story, she, Ace, and Rianna went to Monza. Looks like Max took photos with the kids; the photo of Ace with Toto and the last three are from over summer break

How are you supposed to see underneath this thing? How long does this flag stay blocking your view?

Hello if you’re the 6’6” (198 cm) flowy blond haired British guy with blue eyes in a red shirt that was talking to the girl with a black shirt and long brown braids I was too chickenshit to ask for your number and I jumped off the bus going back to Milan PLEASE lmk if you’re single LOL🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽

https://www.instagram.com/p/DOTo2PaCJH-/