The end of the 2018 Formula 1 season hasn’t been an easy time for Sergey Sirotkin. His financial backers, SMP, decided to break ranks with Williams F1 due to the team’s poor performance and one can certainly understand that. Caught in the crossfire, Sirotkin lost his ride for 2019.
Sergey thought that he had very good chance of retaining his seat for next season but that rapidly eroded.
“It looked quite obvious it would be the case for quite a while,” Sirotkin added.
“But it’s F1, it’s a difficult world.
“To get success there are also many, many different parameters which unfortunately most of the time aren’t up to the performance of the driver or whatever.”
As discussion lengthened, the SMP departure was becoming clearer and Sergey’s future bleaker.
“We had a few meetings, I could understand that discussions were not going the way we wanted them to be,” he said.
“Obviously SMP Racing wanted to be professional and didn’t want to accept those things, it was a strong sign for me that’s it not going to happen.
“But I always hoped that probably something would change, a moment or whatever.
“It didn’t happen.”
Sergey lost his ride even though he beat his teammate, Lance Stroll, in qualifying and in eight of the 17 races they both finished. Stroll, however, will now move to his father’s new Racing Point team for 2019 while Sergey is sitting on the sidelines.
The comeback story of the decade is that Robert Kubica will return in 2019 to take Sergey’s seat while George Russell fills Stroll’s vacant chair. Sergey had a positive attitude even when Stroll was sour-mouthed about the team and he had moments of decent pace and race craft. Sure, there were awkward moments too but you’d expect that from a rookie.
Lance had a full season’s experience over Sergey and yet the Russian proved the better of the two. However, in F1, that doesn’t guarantee you anything these days.
Hat Tip: Autosport
F1 is a harsh harsh world. We never got to see if Sergey had what it takes to be there, due to the car being so woeful and comparing him to his team-mate isn’t that much a benchmark. Unfortunately as a pay driver, when the money runs out (unlike Stroll) so do the drives.