Sergey Sirotkin has admitted that Williams has no hope of catching Sauber in the constructors championship before the end of 2018.
Williams is currently in last place in the standings after 12 races. They have just four points so far, all thanks to Lance Stroll's eighth place finish in Baku. Meanwhile Sauber have amassed 18 points with top ten finishes in seven races so far this year.
While a 14 point deficit might not appear to be huge gulf, Sirotkin concedes that his team has little prospect of closing that gap and catching their rivals in the remaining nine races of the season.
“I think where they are for sure unreachable because they are well into the midfield," the Russian rookie told Crash.net.
Sirotkin is the only driver on the grid yet to score a single championship point so far this year. But he's certainly not giving up and says it's important for the squad to show that Williams is on the way back.
"The key is to try, I wouldn’t say to score concrete results, but to find our concrete and strong recovery," he said. "[We must] start to produce the things which are clearly correlated well to our expectations."
An aggressive design strategy for the FW41 has backfired on Williams so far, but that doesn't mean there isn't much to be learned from this year's chassis.
"What we want to get an understanding of the car and how it should perform and what it should do in different situations," he said.
"That 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.
“We do improve compared to ourselves and in certain areas we actually improve quite significantly," he insisted. "The only problem is that everybody does the same, so it doesn’t really change much, our standing compared to theirs.
"Very often it is overridden, let’s say, by other, bigger factors,” he added, pointing to what happened at the British Grand Prix last month when an aero stall problem with a new iteration rear wing caused all manner of problems.
“For example, what we had then, or the most unlikely and most difficult track and weather conditions for us. All of this covers and masks our improvement we have behind it, so it is difficult."
It's tempting for Williams to just give up on this year's car and focus all development on 2019, but Sirotkin is hoping that the team will be more forward thinking than that.
“I think there is always a balance,” he said. “For sure it should be the balance but again I’m quite sure there are better people than me managing and prioritise the situation.”
“There is an independent group of people who are spending their time doing next year’s car, and this year’s car," he added.
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