Sergey Sirotkin is hoping he can stay on at Williams for 2019 and help in their efforts to recover from a disastrous season.
The Russian may have had a difficult rookie year, only scoring a single point by default after Romain Grosjean’s currently contested exclusion at Monza, but the former F2 driver has often proven a match for teammate Lance Stroll as the British team struggle towards the back of the grid.
As of yet, no seat has been confirmed with an apparent array of options being considered but while Stroll’s move to Force India is all-but-official, Sirotkin has hopes of staying put.
“I think it’s how we are with the team, one united group, we recovered from where we found ourselves after Bahrain, I think we can be quite proud of that,” he was quoted by Motorsport Week.
“It seems more than logical to finish what we started to do and see the end of the… to see actually the pure results of the work we did so far together.
“Many times I spend, honestly too much time, trying to get the things sorted, which obviously were much more long-term than short-term thinking.
“So I just see it much more than logical to get to the end together and see the results of the work we did together.”
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Even though the results have been few and far between, Sirotkin also thinks the amount of work done by Williams this season shouldn’t be underestimated.
“If you put our car now in Melbourne I’d say you’d see it in Q3,” he suggested. “The only thing is the other people are progressing as quick as we did, obviously the issues we found after Bahrain were quite fundamental, issues coming from the very bottom of all the process building the car.
“It took us a lot longer than all of our opponents to first understand what makes those issues and then find a way to solve the basics right. Only afterwards [we were] able to improve the car, working from the right basics, so it takes a much longer process than thinking about just producing a better part on its own.
“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.”