“We were going to the forest for a cycle and the rear brakes weren’t working on my spare bike. It didn’t really affect me because I was using my main bike.
“I would say George isn’t the best cyclist in the world — I cycled more than him [so] I was like, ‘George, you take the good bike, I’ll take the one without the rear brakes’, which I thought was fine.
“We went somewhere new, which is always a little bit dangerous. But it looked fine to me. We didn’t realise at the time, but we were going down a horse track. And that was a horse jump thing — a big stumped tree and the branches coming across the pathway. Behind the branch, there was a huge drop.
“When I saw it, I panicked. I hit the brakes. And obviously my rear brake didn’t work. So I ended up doing kind of this front flip, this endo over the jump. I landed on my collarbone, broke my collarbone. And that was it.”
“From that point onwards, I had a terrible season.”
The broken bone forced Albon to miss the next two races in Baku, interrupting a promising start to the season with leading team ART, where he had recorded top-eight finishes in the first six races.
Although he would go on to finish on the podium twice that year, Albon says that his season went downhill after the crash.
“Still to this day I don’t actually know but I’m pretty sure now: [Sergei Sirotkin] who replaced me had a crash. Quite a big crash in the castle section. And had this damage.
“The first race back was the Red Bull Ring which was ok but I was expecting a bit more. From that point onwards, I had a terrible season. It was one of those seasons that never clicked.
