Williams driver Sergey Sirotkin says that Sauber is now out of reach in the constructor's standings this season. Williams currently occupies the final spot on the table, resting on four points which it took at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix in April.
Sauber is one spot ahead of Williams in ninth, 14 points ahead of the Grove-based outfit. However, Sauber has proved much more capable of fighting for points, having finished inside the top ten on eight occasions so far in the 2018 season.
Williams has struggled massively, and Sirotkin has conceded that finishing ahead of Sauber is too tall of a task: "I think where they [Sauber] are, they are, for sure, unreachable because they are well into the midfield," he admitted.
"For us I think at the moment the key is to try, I wouldn’t say to score concrete results, but to find our concrete and strong recovery way and start to produce the things which are clearly correlated well to our expectations," he added.
"That’s exactly what we want to get an understanding of the car and how it should perform and what it should do in different situations, which already will bring us, I wouldn’t say into the midfield, but so we can do maybe more things in the race and use this as a base for the steps for next year."
With F1 on its summer break, some teams are starting to shift focus onto its 2019 car, and collect data information to make sure they begin next season on the strong foot. However, Sirotkin says that Williams will split its resources and focus on both the 2018 and 2019 cars.
"I think there is always a balance," he said. "The same as there is an independent group of people who are spending their time doing next year’s car, and this year’s car. For sure it should be the balance but again I’m quite sure there are better people than me managing and prioritise the situation."
Fergal Walsh
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