As Muni He enjoys the first of two weekends playing on the LPGA at home in Los Angeles, her Formula 1-driving boyfriend, Alex Albon, is in Italy for the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix. The pair met on social media after He, who goes by Lily, watched the Netflix series “Drive to Survive” and started following drivers. Albon happened to be getting into golf at the time, and the pair connected. He actually credits the series for helping her get out of a slump.
Golfweek recently caught up with the affable Albon, 26, ahead of his race in Italy to talk about growing as an athlete alongside He, Netlflix drama and how golf has the consumed the talk among F1 drivers.
Here are excerpts from that conversation:
Lily has told me her version of how she met you. I want to hear yours …
The story goes … she watched “Drive to Survive.” I wasn’t in “Drive to Survive” at the time. She got into the sport at the same time that I was getting into golf. The first time I picked up a golf club was maybe the beginning of 2019. You could say our interests collided. We met through social media and I was just kind following how she was doing, and she was following how I was doing, and one thing led to another and we met up in LA. It was a week after I had a race in Texas. We played some golf together and that’s how it all got started.
You were kind of rookies at the same in your respective fields. She said she had more followers when you met, but your social media presence has kind of exploded. Can you talk about how your life has changed since you became an F1 driver? (Albon, the driver for Williams Racing, has over 500,000 followers on twitter and 1.5 million on Instagram.)
It’s a great time to be a part of the sport. … I don’t know if it’s the same in the LPGA or the PGA but when I was in Formula 2, at that time especially, there was hardly any kind of outside interest in what I was doing. I had maybe 700, 800 followers at that time. Overnight, being announced as a Formula 1 driver it grew. Massively, actually.
But then as time went on and I started to progress through the field and get better results, that was kind of during the time I met Lily. And so I went from kind of a no one, still relative to her, you know, she has a huge following, at that time it was this turnover. I still remember the day, well, I don’t really, but I remember there was a point obviously where we crossed over in terms of followers. I gave her a little nudge (laughs).
We’re both athletes. It’s a pretty cool place because also, on top of everything, we understand and we get each other. We started our sports as rookies, and we‘ve gone through tough times together. The highs and lows of being an athlete, I think you can resonate that with any athlete. But it also comes with the space that you need. You need a lot of time to work on yourself, and I think golf is really like that, too. In a weird way, we make our long distance relationship work.
What was it like that first time you played golf together and how has she improved your golf game?
So that’s the thing, I don’t know what she’s told you, but I started pretty badly when I was with her, and I have improved. But I wouldn’t say much of my improvement has come from her. I can watch and I can learn and I looked at her tempo and she has an amazing swing. It’s almost textbook the way that her swing looks.
But the problem with us is that she doesn’t know where to start with me. She’s not a golf coach, and she’s not used to having to change absolutely everything in a swing.
I’ll shank the ball and be like ‘Lily, what went wrong?’ And she’s like, ‘I don’t know where to start; it’s all wrong.’
Both sports are super high pressure, but yours has a lot more obvious risk involved. Do you ever get scared out there going at these incredibly high speeds?
Firstly, I would say golfing with me, and the other drivers, is just as dangerous because the ball is going everywhere. (laughs) … I wouldn’t say the risks are that much different.
We’ve been born into it. I was 7 years old when I first drove a go-kart. I know a lot of drivers who were younger than that when they started. The element of fear never comes into play, and if it if ever did, then we would be doing the wrong sport. You can’t hesitate. You’ve got to be fully confident in what you do.
It’s strange. You see crashes and I’ve been in a few crashes, but you kind of dust yourself off and go straight back into it again.
What does make you fearful in this life?
Heights and rats. …. We’ll go hiking in LA or wherever it may be and I’m deathly afraid. I don’t trust my own feet. I’m quite tall and lanky and feel like I could fall over at any second and get blown away in the wind, whereas she’s just fearless.
And rats, I just don’t like rats.
I have to say standing on the tee box, I did a pro-am with Lily in Majorca, in Spain, and that’s pretty scary, too. When they call your name out and everyone is watching on the tee box. I did not enjoy that at all.
Are there are lot of Formula 1 drivers who play golf?
Massively. Most sports, like baseball or cricket, there are a lot of athletes who play golf in general. I think it’s a great way to switch off from the stresses of our lives, but they kind of have almost a similarity of what they do in terms of the swinging and the motion of it.
Where in racing, it’s honestly the complete opposite. You go from high speed, high performance reaction time to something where the ball stays still, and you get your golf buggy and drive to your ball. The buggy part is the similarity in that you’re driving something, but everything else is very different.
Of course, that’s not the same when you’re competing. Us drivers, we play a lot together when we’re on the road so much. We end up always finding golf courses around the circuit. It’s really nice because it’s so slow-paced and so different to what we do. We don’t take it seriously. It’s just a great time. We’ve all caught the bug for it, which is pretty cool. We’re all kind of trying to learn together.
I would say that we have group chats about golf. We’re just talking about it all the time and planning when we’re going to play golf. Even when we see each other, 70 percent of our talk is about golf and 30 percent is about racing.
Alexander Albon of Thailand driving the (23) Williams FW44 Mercedes on track during the F1 Grand Prix of Australia at Melbourne Grand Prix Circuit on April 10, 2022 in Melbourne, Australia. (Photo by Robert Cianflone/Getty Images)
There are lot of new fans to your sport thanks to Netflix. What do they need to know that they’re not getting from the show?
Firstly, I haven’t watched one episode. I don’t like watching myself. But I’m not too interested in the reality TV side of things about it. I think it’s a good demonstration of what goes on, the pressures and everything. There’s a quote from a team principal, who told me, what you see is political and it’s dirty and things don’t look great. But a lot of the time what you see on Netflix is filtered out, like the teams can take stuff out. What’s actually behind the scenes is worse than what’s in the show.
But on the other side of it, I think this new generation that you see is pretty friendly. We get on really well with each other. Netflix, again, I’m just listening to people’s comments, they like to make rivalries about everything that we do. And honestly, like the golf, we really respect each other, but at the same time we are rivals, we want to beat each other but we have a lot of time for each together. We’re good friends, and we’ve grown up together for the most part. A lot of us have raced against each other since we were 8 years old.
But keep watching, enjoy the reality TV side of it. And get down to a race and come watch, because it’s a pretty good weekend out.