Patient Stroll 'waiting for his moment to shine'

It's been a season of little cheer for everyone working at Williams. But Lance Stroll's eighth place at Baku was one of the few rays of sunlight to be seen over Grove in 2018.

It gave the team four championship points - their only points of the season so far - and was a much needed boost for the driver himself in his second season with the team.

“Of course the results are not the ones we want, but picking up points in Azerbaijan was good,” Stroll agreed.

Even so, last year Stroll was on the podium in Baku so this was a distant echo of their form 12 months previously. These days, even getting through to the second round of qualifying is proving a tall order.

“The few times I have got into Q2 felt good," said Stroll, looking on the bright side. "You have to get everything out of it and as a driver that is satisfying.

“I feel like I made a good step over the winter and that I’m much more on top of the car than I was last year."

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With even his team mate Sergey Sirotkin admitting that Williams will finish the year at bottom of the pile, Stroll is finding other targets to keep him focussed for the remaining nine races of the current campaign.

“This sport is a love-hate relationship and you have to have pride in the difficult times,” said the 19-year-old.

"You have to reflect on the past and know that there were good times, and [believe that there will be] good times ahead.

“You just always have to keep the morale high, and keep positive," he said. "Disconnect from the track when you can and come to work motivated and ready to go, regardless of what the situation is.

“You have to ride the rollercoaster. That’s what F1 is," he added. "This sport changes all the time. It’s just about being there and waiting for your moment to shine."

Stroll has been disparaged in some quarters as a 'pay driver' who only has a race seat at Williams thanks to the estimated 15 million euros per year invested un the team by his billionaire father Lawrence.

But with the senior Stroll at the head of a consortium to buy out the stricken Force India team over the summer shutdown, many believe that Lance is already eyeing an early exit from Williams.

For now at least, Stroll is making no comment on that prospect. Instead, he is remaining focussed on what he can do to turn things around at Williams.

“The goal now is to just keep having some consistent weekends with the aim of being further up the grid," he said. “12th or 13th place in a Williams is a good race.

"Then we can come to a conclusion that we are going in the right direction.”

“A lot of the time we see some hope after a good weekend and then the following weekend [is much harder],” he admitted. "It’s still hard to come to a conclusion over where we are with development and where we are compared to the others."

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