Alex Albon believes Formula 1 got “lucky” in conditions close to being “excessively dangerous” during Turkish Grand Prix qualifying.
With grip levels already very low due to the new tarmac at Istanbul Park, rain on Saturday only made the circuit more challenging for the drivers.
Heavy rain at the end of FP3 at least gave drivers a taste of what was to come but, in Q1, another downpour left the track almost undrivable at any speed above crawling pace.
But though there were plenty of spins and a few trips into the gravel in qualifying, Albon was fearing something much, much worse.
“I can understand why people enjoy it,” the Red Bull driver said post-session.
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“I would enjoy it if I wasn’t driving, but I could tell you it’s not as fun in the car as it is on TV. When you’re shifting to sixth gear, even seventh gear in the wet, and you’re getting wheelspin and the car is aquaplaning across the track, that’s not very fun.
“It’s more about the danger of it, more than anything else.
“I think we’ve been lucky not to have a big crash today. We’ve had some close calls obviously, coming into Turn 3.
“I enjoy difficult weather, I enjoy difficult conditions, I enjoy it when there’s more to it than a normal weekend. But at the same time, this is most probably a step towards excessively dangerous, really.”
Albon was also asked about a strange moment at the very start of Q2, as the session began under yellow flags with marshals still clearing Nicholas Latifi’s Williams at Turn 8.
“That wasn’t very good,” he said. “I imagined that we were trying to make sunset, and we rushed everything.
“But that was silly, and I’m sure we could have waited another five minutes for a crane to move.
“I think there must have been some misjudgement between them because there’s no way they did it on purpose.
“I mean, it was just hard to understand where the decision came from, because the crane was still on track, lifting Latifi, and we got the call out to go on to the track and wait at the end of the pit lane.
“I was expecting like a five-minute signal, but it was one minute to go to green. And I was like, okay, they must have moved that crane pretty quickly but obviously, it didn’t have enough time.”