George Russell described the start of Formula 1’s second pre-season test as Williams’ “proper day one” with its FW42, following last week’s delays and setbacks.
Williams was unable to ready its new 2019 car until the afternoon of the third day of last week’s opening pre-season test, and thereafter amassed only 88 laps.
The team finished substantially behind its rivals in terms of mileage and was also comfortably at the bottom of the combined leaderboard.
But Russell completed 119 laps in the FW42 during the opening day of the second test at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya on Tuesday and placed ninth; his best time of 1:19.662 was within two seconds of leader Lando Norris (McLaren).
“It feels like a proper day one for us really,” he said.
“It’s great to get some laps on the car, just understand a bit of low fuel, high fuel, what the car’s doing.
“It certainly hasn’t made up for last week, as everybody else at this stage are fine tuning the balance whereas we’re needing to understand the car, but I feel we’re at a good spot.
“The car isn’t in the perfect window right now but I feel like it’s definitely got the potential and we’ve still got three days ahead of us to do that.”
Russell added that Williams is not “too worried” over its status compared to its opponents, pointing to the different conditions expected at the opening two Grands Prix.
“Everything you do in testing you can only take with a pinch of salt because the temperature here is going to be much, much cooler than it will be when we arrive in Australia and Bahrain,” he said.
“All of the races are much, much hotter.
“So the most important we can learn from this test are the aero runs – to see what the aero is doing – and also just to make sure the reliability is good, so I don’t think we’re too worried.”
Russell will hand over to team-mate Robert Kubica for Wednesday’s running.
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