George Russell drove in Formula 1 last year. This year, he needs to race. Many will have registered Russell's ungainly Williams only when it was being lapped, or perhaps when he put in the occasional cameo, for example almost reaching Q2 in Hungary.
But the FW42 was so bad that he was mostly nailed to the back row with nobody to fight except team-mate Robert Kubica, whom he outpaced comprehensively.
Yet Russell has come out of a pointless season with his burgeoning reputation enhanced, despite it being difficult to spot the difference between a driver with prodigious potential in a tail-end machine and a mediocre one, given the results look very similar.