Sergey Sirotkin says he and Williams have occasionally carried out "perfect" races in 2018 that are being masked by the weaknesses of its FW41.
Ex-Sauber and Renault tester Sirotkin captured a race seat with Williams for 2018 but his graduation coincided with the team’s regression to the rear of the field, amid deficiencies with its recalcitrant FW41.
Sirotkin is the only driver on the 2018 grid yet to score a point and has failed to even complete a race lap within the top 10 positions, but expressed confidence over his own displays.
"It's been quite a good year so far," said Sirotkin. "I mean obviously not in terms of results, but being realistic in the position where we saw ourselves after Australia and Bahrain it really changed the approach of the team with [their] expectations.
"I think since then, for sure it was a tough year, it’s been quite difficult to make any impression – it doesn’t really matter how good the job you are doing, even from where we are it’s quite difficult [to impress].
"If you do a perfect job it just looks like… there were a couple of occasions where I was sitting here [with the media] and I wanted to say that I did a perfect job but from the outside it never looks like this.
“From where we are, a very good job just looks okay and then you go up here and don’t even feel [that it’s] nice to say we were performing very well, so this is difficult to make any bright stories from it.
“At the same time you always need to perform well because from where we are as soon as you kind of underperform a little bit it’s so visible that everybody starts to talk about it and so on.
“It’s been tough in those terms, honestly I think I managed it quite well, again I don’t want to be too optimistic about myself but I can be quite happy with what I did.
“But again it’s quite tough to keep proving yourself in such a position.”
Team-mate Lance Stroll scored Williams’ only four points at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix in April, although Sirotkin holds a slender 6-5 advantage across one-lap over Stroll.
