Williams driver Logan Sargeant believes his team will “be in a good place” if it can rebound from its poor start to testing over the remaining two days.
The team completed the fewest laps of any of the ten teams by far in the opening day of testing in Bahrain. Sargeant and team mate Alexander Albon covered 61 laps between them, less than half that of the next least productive team, RB.Albon was forced to stop on track towards the end of the opening session with a fuel pump problem, while Sargeant lost running in the evening with a suspected driveshaft fault.
“Obviously we didn’t get through what we wanted to get through, but it wasn’t all negative – there were definitely some positives,” Sargeant insisted after the opening day.
“The car is very different, so that takes some ironing out, but in a positive way. I think it’s the direction that we need to head. Once we get it figured out, it’ll be a better car. But for the moment I’ve only done 11 [timed] laps, so I’m looking forward to a whole day tomorrow. Hopefully we can just understand a few of the issues we had today and get on top of them.”
Sargeant also had the biggest on-track scare of the day when he lost control approaching the tight, downhill tenth turn and spun his car at high speed. Fortunately, Sargeant avoided hitting anything and admitted he had been “lucky” to get away unscathed from the spin.
“It was unexpected,” he said. “We just bottomed – it snapped pretty quickly. But at least I know not to do it tomorrow.”
Despite Williams’ troubles, Sargeant is confident that there is more performance to unlock from the new FW46.
“I think everyone sees the potential,” he said. “Obviously we’re not completely happy with what we got done today – we’ve missed quite a few laps – but it is what it is. You can only control what you can and we have another long two days to make up for it and a couple extra sets of tyres as well.
“We have the main areas that we need to improve on, we just need to put our priorities in the right place. If we do that, we’ll get through the big items and I think we’ll be in a good place.”
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