Source: Williams Media Library

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Sirotkin: Williams looking to make a big step in 2019

Sirotkin: Williams looking to make "a big step" in 2019

11-10-2018 13:30
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Jake Williams-Smith

Sergey Sirotkin believes that Williams is set to make big gains in the winter after a dismal 2018 season. The Russian has endured a poor rookie year but has been dealing with an underperforming Williams FW41 down the back of the field for most of the races this year.

Although he didn't want to set expectations too high, Sirotkin admitted that the team have been working hard and their 2019 work looks promising at this early stage.

“I don’t want to be too optimistic, but it (2019 plans) looked already quite a big step better than the situation was exactly this time last year about the current car. Even in terms of the time-wise, let’s say, it is a step ahead, which is always good.

“So again I don’t want to say that we will be immediately back and everything will be 100 per cent as we want. But for sure it looks like we learned a big lesson and did a good improvement based on the work we did so far this year.”

Although Sirotkin has not been confirmed at the Williams team for 2019, he believes that there is a mindset and determination at the team to return them to the heights that they've enjoyed in the past.

“I think it’s based on fundamental understanding, let’s say, on the process to build the car, it started from there. That’s why it took us so long to understand it properly and get over it.

“I think now we learned many lessons about the very, very basics of all the procedure from zero to the end and I think the way we approach it with the new car is going to be already with quite a different process, (a different) system. So we can avoid the issues we finally found this year and obviously get more performance from it.”