Alexander Albon believes the opportunity to drive Red Bull’s car outside of a race weekend once the season ends will help him improve his performance.

He joined the team during the summer break and has been confirmed as a full-time driver for the 2020 F1 season . However Albon says he is still working out how to get the most out of the RB15 and the team, and the chance to go testing will help that.

“I’m still finding areas in the car where which I know I need to work on and just feel more comfortable with,” he said. “But I know that’s [down to] seat time and that’s playing around with different things. Just finding that happy middle place where I’m confident in the car and I’m feeling like I can really extract that performance out of it.

“I know it’ll take time, but that’s also why I’m looking forward to the testing post-season in Abu Dhabi and even when we have our pre-season testing. Of course it’s not that easy to do a lot of changes during a race weekend just because you have very limited time and not much time to experiment with the car.”

On average, Albon has been around half a second slower than team mate Max Verstappen in qualifying. But he expects to get faster as he spends more time at the wheel.

“I think it’s just general driving really,” he said. “Once I can start to really push the car I will feel comfortable. That’s when the lap time will pick up.”

Albon said he tried not to get distracted by speculation about his future at the team before his place was confirmed and he intends to carry on doing the same.

“The way I’ve been thinking about things, I’m just trying to be very in the present and not thinking about all the external stuff.

“It even carries on for now, I think I’ll just keep on doing what I’m doing for the rest of the season and then onto next year. Because knowing or not knowing wouldn’t have changed the situation, it’s still the results that count and that was my focus.”

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2019 F1 season