THE WILLIAMS DRIVER GAMBLE
IT WAS INEVITABLE THAT DEPUTY team principal Claire Williams would be asked about running two drivers who bring financial backing when the team held its season launch in London last Thursday. She said she was expecting it.
Sergey Sirotkin and Lance
Stroll are both capable drivers, but there is no denying that their seats are linked to significant financial packages.
Williams, unsurprisingly, defended the team’s pairing.
“It’s nothing new in F1 that drivers come with money, and thank goodness they do,” says Williams. “It would be incredibly naive for anyone to make that statement, saying, ‘He’s just a pay driver’. It’s great if a driver has financial interests from partners – it’s great for the team, it’s great for the driver. This is an expensive sport, not just F1 but at grassroots level as well. We’d miss out on so much talent coming into F1 if drivers didn’t have financial backing supporting them through the junior formulas, and bringing them into F1.
“I think the terminology used around pay drivers is wrong, it’s inappropriate and it’s unnecessary, and it puts negativity around a driver that we just should not be doing in this sport anymore. There are commercial issues of course, but we make our driver decisions based on talent, based on what Paddy [Lowe]’s engineering team needs in order to take this team forward, not about any potential financial backing that they have.”
Stroll already had a deal to drive for Williams in 2018, and Lowe is adamant that Sirotkin was the best available driver, since the team decided Robert Kubica wasn’t good enough to get the race seat.
“The selection process we used for that race seat was incredibly exhaustive, the most exhaustive I’ve ever been involved with, involving the technical team,” he says. “Sergey was selected simply on merit for his driving.
That team knows nothing about finances, they’re not involved in it, they weren’t aware of any factors like that.”
But ultimately, Williams has the youngest line-up on the grid and questions remain as to whether they will be able to get the most out of the car given their inexperience.