Williams F1 Spanish Grand Prix

Race Notes

• Lance Stroll finished 11th and Sergey Sirotkin 14th in the Spanish Grand Prix
• Both cars started on the soft Pirelli tyre, with Lance starting 18th and Sergey 19th
• Lance had an excellent start to climb to P12 on the opening lap meanwhile a crash between Grosjean, Hulkenberg and Gasly brought out the Safety Car
• Sergey had to take evasive action to avoid the crash and then pitted under the Safety Car, swapping to the medium tyre
• Lance stayed on the soft tyre until lap 20 when he pitted for the medium, with Sergey pitting for a second set of mediums five laps later
• The Virtual Safety Car was deployed late in the race when Ocon stopped at the side of the track, with Sergey spinning at the restart
• Sergey made his third and final pitstop immediately after, changing to the supersoft tyres

Paddy Lowe, Chief Technical Officer: It’s been a very difficult weekend performance-wise but certainly to get two cars home is a credit to the team. For the guys in the garage, it’s the same amount of work despite our pace, so I’m pleased for them that we got both cars to the finish ahead of the test this week. With Lance, we narrowly missed the points after a fantastic first lap got him up to 12th, a position he consolidated to finish 11th with really good, consistent pace and tyre management. Sergey had a more difficult afternoon suffering with the balance of the car. It got more difficult as he had a lot of lapped cars to manage, which lost him tyre temperatures as a consequence. As a team we haven’t done a good enough job with the development of this FW41 and we will keep working hard back at base and at the test this week to come back in a stronger position.

Lance Stroll: We scored no points but it was a good race.  I made a good start again with a lot of positions. Then it was just steady running and I did everything I could, but just missed out on points. After the safety car period it was tricky, as tyre warm up was hard and I suffered a little bit there, but all in all it was okay. The medium tyres were pretty easy to manage and I am really happy with the race we had. Eleventh is pretty much everything we could hope for today.

Sergey Sirotkin: It’s been a very tough day. I had a good start and I was right in the mix before I almost got caught by a couple of spins ahead of me. I needed to slow down to avoid them but once I was through, I was last. I managed to fight a bit with Toro Rosso and get ahead for a couple of laps. Today, it was the worst I have experienced throughout the whole race. I struggled a lot with my seating comfort which we are looking into.