George Russell: “Really strong” improvement rate should make Williams competitive

Williams, who have won nine constructors championships in their time in F1 since 1977, have spent the past two seasons at the back of the grid, achieving only eight points across both, only one point in 2019.
 
In pre-season testing last year the Grove-based team missed part of the first week, but Russell feels with the changes made to the team, things will be different his year.

“The team took a big reset with an aero philosophy and we had to take that hit in performance to rebuild those foundations, so starting the season we were not surprised [with] the position we were in,” he said as quoted by Autosport.com.

“We did hope to improve at a greater rate than we did, but those foundations took longer to put in place than we all anticipated.

“[But] now, the rate of improvement we are on is really strong.

“We can really see that in the windtunnel tracker of the downforce we had at the start of the year, to what we have in the car now, to what we believe we will be starting next year.

“The only thing we don’t know is how much everybody else will improve.

“I can tell you now that if everybody else doesn’t improve at all, we’ll be well and truly in that fight.”