Williams 'happy' with Stroll and Sirotkin despite pointless start

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Williams technical chief Paddy Lowe says that the team isn't hiding its current performance issues behind the youth and relative inexperience of its driver line-up.

Williams is the only team to fail to score any points so far in 2018.

Lance Stroll has scored a hat-trick of 14th places in Melbourne, Bahrain and Shanghai. Sergey Sirotkin has back-to-back 15th positions in the most recent outings after retiring in the season opener.

Sirotkin is a rookie with just three races experience. By comparison, Stroll has a full season under his belt and a podium finish in last year's Azerbaijan Grand Prix - even though he's only 20 years old.

“We have two different drivers that are relatively inexperienced," acknowledged Lowe. "But we are very happy with what they are doing.

"It is not causing us any issues. And we would not allow that to distract from the fact that we have not produced a car that is performing correctly, or as we would have intended.”

The team has been criticised for putting sponsorship revenue ahead of competitiveness when deciding its driver-line-up, not least by former driver Felipe Massa.

Massa happy to put Williams behind him

Whatever the reason, the FW41 has undeniably fallen significantly short of expectations so far.

"In the end everything you do with cars driven by real drivers," Lowe admitted. "You have to factor in the quality of the driver, the effect of the driver, that took your interpretation of that car. And every driver is different.

"We are not where we hoped to be and intend to be in terms of competition," he continued. "But it is of our own making. Clearly what we have done has not been good enough.

"But there is a sense of optimism already that we can make solid progress and rapid progress. We have already started down that road."

Lowe rejected the suggestion that a cloud of gloom and doom was hanging over the team's headquarters in Grove.

"I wouldn’t say that there has been a lot of depression," he said. "That is not the way to dig yourself out of a situation.

"It is about going away, analysing and understanding where you are. Then understanding what you have to do and focusing the organisation around that."

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.