George Russell wants the Williams Racing team to continue their development push in order to move further forward on the grid this season, with the Briton eager to get ahead of their closest rivals and into the midfield battle.
Russell, who has yet to score a point in Formula 1 since making his debut at the start of the 2019 season due to the lack of competitiveness from Williams, believes the team remain in ‘Class C’ of the championship.
However, unlike last year, they are racing at the same kind of pace as the Haas F1 Team and Alfa Romeo Racing ORLEN outfits, particularly in Qualifying. Russell has made it into the second phase of Qualifying in four of the first six races of the season.
The Briton says the fact that Williams are not on their own at the back of the field this year is giving the team extra motivation to extract everything they can out of the car in order to get ahead of their immediate rivals, both on track and in the championship standings.
“I think it adds motivation for all of us,” Russell is quoted as saying by MotorsportWeek.com. “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.”
