It’s normal for F1 racers to share camaraderie off the pitch, but the new generation of racers bonds in a different style –on Twitch. Twitch is a popular streaming service among online gamers, which include Alex Albon and his F1 rivals Charles Leclerc, Lando Norris and George Russell.
As the season got delayed due to the pandemic, F1 switched it to online racing with several mainstream racers participating in the same. The “F1 driver sim racing” saw these 4 race intensely, and Albon said the reason for that is the racing do online regardless. Speaking on F1’s Nation podcast, Albon said,” “You could call it the Twitch quartet, Charles, George, [me] and Lando. We're all close, and we all have our own relationships in between the four.”
He continued, saying he was especially close with George Rusell. According to Albon, “I'm probably closest with George just because we spend so much time together. But we all want each other to do well, I think. We are the young generation, you could say, coming into Formula 1, and we support each other.”
“Formula 1 is quite a big world, and despite being as prepared as you can be, it's still in some respects quite daunting, and we're there for support,” added Albon, whose 2020 form was publicly defended by Russell recently. “It's no secret that the press is hard, the media is hard but my friends are always there. We talk about everything; I would say 80% of what we talk about is not to do with racing, it's to do with, rubbish!”
Interestingly, Albon declared that there is no love lost on the paddock or during the race between the racers though. He clarified, “You could almost say there's an unwritten rule that when you have your helmet on, there's no friendship. When you see a car, it doesn’t matter what car it is, you race it like it's anybody else. There's no, 'Oh, after you', kind of thing. It's very much you're fighting for position.”
“What's normal about it for us is we've done that since karting. We could race each other on track, and then we're riding our BMXs around the karting paddock. It's quite a normal thing for you to race hard on the track and be friendly off it.”
