George Russell says Williams is eager to join the “B Class” midfield battle after catching the tail of the field this year.
The Grove-based team, which announced it has been sold on Friday, has been enjoying a much improved season, with Russell making Q2 in four straight races, finishing 12th twice.
Unfortunately, race pace has the main weakness so far with the Briton falling back on a Sunday, but after what he called a “satisfying” race in Spain, he thinks the gap is closing.
“I think it adds motivation for all of us,” said Russell via Motorsport Week.
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“We don’t want to be here fighting for the latter positions, but the fact that we are on par with the Haas and the Alfas; they probably still just have the legs on us but they are really within striking distance.
“It adds that extra motivation for me as a driver, the team, to really get everything out of it and it’s going to keep allowing everybody to push further to try and get us back into the B Class category.
“At the moment we’re in the C Class along with Haas and Alfa, we still need to keep pushing to get into the B Class, but obviously the Mercedes and Red Bull are just in a league of their own at the moment.”
Looking ahead to the next two races at Spa and Monza, it would be anticipated that Williams could be stronger around two venues where the Mercedes power advantage is set to be more advantageous but…
“No, actually. No,” Russell claimed. “Even though we have the strongest engine in the back we are by far the draggiest car on the grid.
“That is why you’ve seen us go really strong in Budapest the last two years because it is not a power-sensitive circuit as such and even though we have a lot of power we’re not really utilising it because we have so much drag on the car.
“So compared to the Racing Point and the Mercedes we are a huge amount of speed down on them, purely because the car is so draggy.
“Even though on paper you think ‘well, we have a Mercedes, we should be flying in Spa and Monza’ it’s not the case because unfortunately aerodynamically we have really poor efficiency in the car and that will actually make it really tough for us.”