Latifi grateful to Williams crew after 'overstepping the limit' with Sochi smash

Nicholas Latifi has delivered a heartfelt thanks to his Williams team following after conceding to 'overstepping the limit' and suffering a heavy practice crash.

With 35 minutes remaining of FP1 at the Sochi Autodrom, Latifi slid off at Turn 10, initially smashing into a barrier with the rear-wing of the FW43, with the force spinning him around enough for the left-hand side of the car's nose to end up buried.

The Canadian eventually made it back on track 20 minutes into FP2, and performing well enough to finish 15th on the timesheet, a place ahead of team-mate George Russell.

"I overstepped the limit in FP1," said Latifi. "The track was very green, very dusty, which is kind of a characteristic of this track for the first session.

"There were a lot of other people going off, it was very tricky out there. I was the one that went off the fastest and had the biggest shunt sadly.

"It is just unfortunate as it left my boys a lot of work to do to get the car back out there. They did a really great job.

"We didn't make it out for all of FP2 but we were still able to complete most of the FP2 programme, so a big thanks to them.

"FP2 felt much better and even with the missed track time, I felt straightway comfortable with the car. The qualifying simulations and the race runs looked promising which has given us some interesting data to look over going into tomorrow."

Latifi has yet to out-qualify Russell in the nine races so far this year, yet he feels he is in a good position to finally end that run, as well as again challenge Haas and Alfa Romeo for a place in Q2.

"That [Q2] is definitely what we are targeting each weekend now," added Latifi. "We're coming in with the intention to race Haas and Alfa.

"It's nice coming into every weekend knowing we can race other cars, which is a credit to the team for all the progress we've been making. We're definitely going to be pushing to get ahead of them."

Before you go...

Ricciardo finally "hooked up" at Sochi after lengthy "homework" assignment

Sainz apologies to McLaren for causing "unnecessary stress"

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