George Russell says Williams still has to optimise its current package rather than merely wait for upgrades to its FW42 to arrive.
Williams has struggled for performance in Formula 1 this season and has remained rooted to the back of the field with its recalcitrant and ill-handling FW42.
Russell and team-mate Robert Kubica have qualified over a second off the pace at both Grands Prix and finished as the final classified runners in race trim.
“We’ve got some really good understanding of things we need to change to improve,” said Russell.
“Obviously the biggest limitation at the moment is outright downforce, but certainly there are things we can do to go quicker with the amount of downforce we’ve got.
“So we need to go back and they should be relatively… not easy fixes but we should be able to have a quicker turnaround with something like that. We’re learning on that front.
“It’s small gains, but small gains here and there before you know it they all add up.”
Russell felt that Williams was “almost” in a position to scrap with the tail-end of the midfield in Bahrain.
“We were almost fighting in… I think I could have held [Lance] Stroll off, Stroll overtook me with the [Sebastian] Vettel incident,” he said.
“I went to the outside of Vettel and Stroll overtook me on the inside. Without that, I think I could have held Stroll off. He was definitely quicker but we had enough pace to hold him off.
“I think [Carlos] Sainz was struggling to get past me for five or six laps before and he did an additional pit stop which maybe in hindsight was better.
“But small signs that if we optimise it slightly more we can pick up from people’s mistakes and we need to capitalise on that.”
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