Sirotkin: FP2 ‘very, very, very bad’ for Williams

Sergey Sirotkin painted a very bleak picture of events at Williams as they propped up the timesheet once again in Canada.

Lance Stroll and Sirotkin, in P19 and P20 respectively, were both 2.5 seconds off the quickest time set by Max Verstappen and three tenths slower than the next car above – Pierre Gasly in the Toro Rosso.

And Sirotkin revealed that the main issue at the moment for Williams is that the car is simply not capable of getting any life out of the tyres.

“FP2 was a very, very, very bad session to be honest,” Sirotkin said.

“I didn’t get anything out from the tyres.

“We know how important it is this year. Putting it right, I think it’s quite a big thing to improve. It’s not always been so easy for us to understand how to extract more from the tyre at the moment.

“It was much better in FP1 with the prime tyre, but on the softer compounds, it didn’t work.”

Sirotkin also conceded the team had a bad feeling about the opening day in Canada, even before a lap had been completed.

He added: “Sometimes it works OK, sometimes it’s not. Also some things we did more like, probably we knew before the runs it’s not going to be ideal, but had to go for it in terms of the learning we wanted to collect.

“Before the session we knew it was going to be compromised, but for sure it was a bit more painful than we thought. There’s a lot of time in tyre performance, and for sure we missed it completely this session.”

“It’s probably not as disappointing as it looks on the standings itself.”