'Resurrected' Williams has "proved those doubters wrong"

Williams deputy team principal Claire Williams believes her team has "proved those doubters wrong", and the on-track improvement is a "vindication" of the hard work of the team.

Williams approached the current season with the sole aim of closing the gap to the midfield after finishing bottom of the constructors standings for the past two years.

In each of the past two race weekends, George Russell has escaped Q1 and qualified 12th, but the Hungarian Grand Prix saw him joined in Q2 by team-mate Nicholas Latifi.

It was the first time since the Italian Grand Prix of 2018 that Williams had achieved this, and Williams labelled it an "exoneration, it is vindication".

Williams said: “A lot of people had their doubts that this team would ever be able to resurrect itself, and I think we have proved those doubters wrong.

"That gives me an enormous sense of satisfaction, because I’ve never believed that Williams was on its way out, because we are a team of fighters.

“We’ve got an incredible team spirit, and anyone that does doubt Williams should be careful, because we’ve got what it takes to take this team back to where we want it to be, and we will never give up until we’ve done that."

Acknowledging the difficulty of the past two years, Williams concedes it's hard for people on the outside to comprehend how tough life has been within the team over the past few years.

She added: "Clearly we’ve had an incredibly difficult two years and, unless you’ve actually been through that experience yourself, you don’t quite understand how difficult it really can be.

“I think we’ve demonstrated that over the last couple of years. Again, when you haven’t been in the position of coming to a racetrack and knowing that you’re going to be knocked out of Q1 every race, that you’re going to finish every race last, you’re not going to race with anybody, it is soul-destroying.

“But we kept turning up, we kept doing the job, we kept learning in the shadows, and that is now paying off, now that we are in a position with a race car which we can race, that we’ve taken those lessons, and now we’re benefiting from them.

“It really feels – I think, until you’ve actually been in these kinds of circumstances, you can’t truly appreciate how it feels to pull yourself out of it, and how satisfying it feels on a day like today, because you really feel like you’ve earned it.”

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