Of the hundreds of drivers who have graced the grid during Formula 1’s 76-year history, only 26 have completed a century of race starts with a single constructor. A new name is set to join the list this weekend at the Hungarian Grand Prix.After breaking former world champion Nigel Mansell’s record last month to become the driver with the most race starts for Williams on 96, Alex Albon is on the verge of his second milestone of the season.The now 30-year-old joined the British team in 2022, filling the void created by George Russell’s switch to Mercedes.After Red Bull pulled him from a full-time race seat, making him its test and reserve driver instead, Albon had been on the F1 sidelines for a year. But that season away laid the foundation for the driver we see today — the leader of his team, and someone Patrick Harding, his performance coach, describes as a competitor who “wears his heart on his sleeve” but isn’t “insecure about who he is as a human being”.“The proudest bit of working with him is seeing the individual he’s become now, compared to the challenges that he faced seven, eight years ago,” Harding, Albon’s coach of eight years, said in an interview. “You never want to be made a reserve driver, but the learnings that he had from that year at Red Bull, from both a technical and a human point of view, were absolutely integral to who he is as an individual.“And if you ask me: would I change that? Probably not, because I don’t think we’d have the Alex Albon that we have right now.”Five years ago, Albon stood at a crossroads.Red Bull had replaced him with Sergio Pérez at the end of the 2020 season, after he had struggled to match teammate Max Verstappen’s pace.While keeping one foot in F1 as the team’s reserve driver, he also competed in the Deutsche Tourenwagen Masters (DTM), a German sports car and touring car series, that season, finishing sixth in the drivers’ championship with a single win and multiple podium finishes across the 16 races.But what was instrumental to Albon’s career was the time he spent during 2021 in the simulator and working with Simon Rennie, an engineer at Red Bull.“Alex’s technical knowledge went up exponentially,” Harding said. “His understanding of the car, his understanding of the engineering side, what he needed from a car to be quick. It was unrecognizable in that first year at Williams compared to where he’d been that second year at Red Bull. So that was testament to the support he got at Red Bull.”Red Bull replaced Alex Albon with Sergio Pérez at the end of the 2020 season. (Mark Thompson / Getty Images)Harding also felt his year on the F1 sidelines challenged Albon to question who he was as a person. Over that time, he watched as Albon began focusing more on himself away from the track.“One of the biggest challenges that young athletes have, and some established athletes as well, is separating themselves from their sport and that identity piece,” Harding said, “and that’s such a huge component of being successful. If you view yourself as what you do, then when you’re challenged on that, (it’s) very much an emotional response because you view that as a challenge to you as an individual.”Around the same time, Russell was racing for Williams in 2020 but was heading to Mercedes for the following year. Albon recalled speaking with his fellow Brit, who joined F1 in 2019 with Albon and Lando Norris. “We would hide out behind the bins and talk about a possible chance back in Formula 1,” Albon said in an interview during last weekend’s Belgian Grand Prix.He would ask Russell when he was making the move to Mercedes. The Williams seat is what Albon wanted, and it’s what he eventually secured.And Russell did help, to an extent, by giving Albon a “warm welcome” to Williams and introducing him to people. He also gave him advice on areas the team needed to work on. “Just gave me a bit of a head start, so I could start my winter season already preparing for a team,” Albon said.