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"We didn't match our expectations"

19:12, 04 Oct 2018

byAdam Newton

Williams have certainly been well under par this season, especially given their esteemed history in the sport.

The team won nine constructors’ and seven drivers’ championships in the 1980s and 1990s and have racked up a mammoth tally of 114 wins in Formula One, but their 2018 form has been well off the pace in comparison.

The team has only managed to score seven points this season, six from Lance Stroll and one from Sergey Sirotkin and are rooted to the bottom of the constructors’ standings, 20 points behind nearest rivals Sauber.

And now Russian driver Sirotkin has revealed that the team understands that they did not meet their goals for the season.

Sirotkin’s sole point came in the Italian Grand Prix, despite finishing 11th on track he was promoted to P10 after Romain Grosjean’s disqualification.

The 23-year old said: “For sure we didn’t match our expectations.

“We all expected to be much higher and expected to be performing in a very different end of the field to what we are, but again the last thing you wanted to do is to enter and see how difficult it is and give up.”

Sirotkin, whose future at the team is still up in the air, also made a very interesting prediction. He believes that the car Williams have now would fare much better if they had it at the beginning of the season.

He added: “It’s still very much track and weather related, but if you put our car now in Melbourne I’d say you’d see it in Q3. The only thing is the other people are progressing as quick as we did.

“I think with the effort we made to recover from where we’ve been, even if we didn’t exactly achieve what we wanted, we can be proud of the work and the effort we did.”