Williams rookie Sergey Sirotkin says he was just “surviving” a situation that he labelled “dangerous” at the Spanish Grand Prix, amid complaints over his seat.
Williams endured another difficult weekend at the Circuit de Barcelona-Cataunya and a thrice-lapped Sirotkin came home as the final classified finisher in 14th position.
Sirotkin, who spun at Turn 9 shortly after the Virtual Safety Car restart, was left perplexed post-race, and alluded to an issue with his seat, though was wary over divulging details.
“To be honest, there’s not even much you can say, it was the toughest race I ever did by far,” he said.
“We were doing not the best race for sure but we were just there.
“Then obviously with all this uncomfortable… I would probably call it much more, very painful, feeling I was getting, it was definitely not helping the race in this stint and the focus.
“Then I made a mistake on the restart, spun the car and decided where we’ve been anyway it’s not that we could do much so we decided why don’t we pit for the extra set of tyres in case whatever can happen.
“Since then I could hardly not do much because of quite a few issues on top of what I had with the seat position and some other things, so it was just really driving to the end I would say, surviving is a better word.”
Sirotkin revealed that he had spent 40 minutes in Williams’ garage post-race trying to solve the issues and when pushed further on the matter by Motorsport Week he commented: “this is the tricky point because if I say something wrong he’s [my engineer] not going to be happy.
“But there are some bits, not really the seat position but some bits which kind of help you to be or not to move around in the car which we are struggling a lot all the year.
“[In the race] we reached the worst point of that, for sure the way it was it’s dangerous and not raceable at all, so yeah, but now at the end we need to solve it already.”
