Williams 'surviving not racing' - Stroll

Lance Stroll says Williams are "surviving" rather than racing as the team continue to struggle into the 2018 season. Stroll finished 14th at the Australian Grand Prix as the second-to-last car to be classified ahead only of Brendon Hartley's Toro Rosso.

Stroll started the race 13th, but immediately lost that place to Esteban Ocon and proved no match for the displaced Mercedes of Valtteri Bottas.

Williams team-mate Sergey Sirotkin lasted just five laps into his Formula 1 debut before a farcical retirement brought on by a sandwich bag getting caught in his brake ducts and causing them to overheat.

Robert Kubica commented that operating the Williams was "like driving a bus" during pre-season testing and the team have conceded that they are struggling one again to master handling this year, despite the arrival of Paddy Lowe from Mercedes.

And Stroll looks set for a campaign of struggle in a car he says was "all over the place".

"We're not racing out there at the moment, we are surviving," said the Canadian.

"The first lap I had a mode problem, for some reason I was in the wrong mode so I had no deployment. I just gave a position to Ocon, with a massive de-rate. That kind of put us on the back foot after the first lap.

"From there onwards we struggled with pace. The car wasn't cooperating the way I wanted it to, the balance was all over the place.

"And we had temperature issues the whole race, managing temperatures. So I had to back off, I could never race the car.

"I was always just trying to survive, lift-and-coast, and get the car to the end of the race. That's costing us massive race time.

"On top of that I didn't have as much mode as I would usually have in this race, because of what happened on Friday with the overheating issue.

"The whole weekend we expected issues coming into the race. We knew there'd be a lot of problems. Realistically, it's tough to point out one issue. There are a lot of things to sort out."