Stroll committed to Williams, despite 2018 'rude awakening'

Lance Stroll's billionaire father says they remain committed to Williams for the time being, despite the team's wretched start to the 2018 season. Williams appear to have by far the weakest package on the grid and their chances of adding points to, or improving upon, Stroll's eighth-place finish in Baku appear highly unlikely.

Aerodynamic struggles have hampered both Stroll and rookie team-mate Sergey Sirotkin this year, with the Mercedes power unit helping to mask their myriad issues at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, where Stroll followed up last year's third-place finish with another fine drive.

However, repeating such results looks beyond them, with technical chief Paddy Lowe admitting that the team have gotten things badly wrong in 2018.

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Stroll's father Lawrence has been linked with bankrolling a partnership between Williams and Mercedes - similar to that between Ferrari and Haas.

"We're not there yet," he told Motorsport about the chances of his son leaving the team. "I believe in Williams, I believe in the team. Clearly they got it wrong so far.

"I do believe this is a rude awakening, and hopefully it will bring the best out of the people, and they'll fix it. I'm sure not as quick as we'd like, and not as quick as they'd like either.

"But we're not going anywhere else.

"Obviously the car clearly isn't where we hoped and wanted to be, it's quite a way off. We struggled when we came here for testing, and we're still struggling. So it's pretty apparent to the eye what's wrong with the car.

"I gather everyone is trying their best, there's a great sense of urgency in the team. It's not that they don't recognise the problem, everybody does. A blind person could see the problem. I know they're working hard to fix it."

Stroll has finished all five races this year, finishing ahead of Sirotkin each time and once again displaying a skill for making up places off the line that helped him last season too.

"I think his performance, based on the car he has, has been phenomenal," Lawrence added. "He can't qualify the car much better than where he qualifies it, but he does amazingly well on that opening lap.

"I think he's beaten his teammate all five times, and beaten a lot of people that the car is not capable of beating. So from a performance point of view with Lance, we couldn't be happier.