The illness that helped define F1's newest addition

As Nicholas Latifi lay in a hospital bed in January 2018, he had no idea how much the situation was going to impact his season.

In terms of results, it led to a nightmare Formula 2 campaign - motorsport is a results-driven industry. But, ultimately, it helped shape him into a driver who won't do a bad job in Formula 1, and could even prove to do better than that.

Latifi will replace Robert Kubica at Williams next year and, looking at the results from his junior career, you may be questioning why.

He has always been rapid. He jumped into European Formula 3 way too early in 2013 after a season in Italian F3 but, after a career that has included seat time in Formula Renault 3.5 and even Porsche Carrera Cup GB, Latifi finally looked to be a tantalising prospect in the second half of the 2017 F2 season when he battled Charles Leclerc and Oliver Rowland.

After that, 2018 was supposed to be his year. He had the continuity of sticking with the DAMS squad, a new car levelling the field and a lot of rookies taking up competitive seats - George Russell, Alex Albon, Lando Norris etc - so the stars were aligning.

But then, before the new 2018 F2 car had even hit the track, disaster hit as an unwell Latifi was taken to hospital.

Latifi's camp has declined to specify what the illness was, but it hospitalised him for a number of weeks and meant he missed half of pre-season testing, the value of which cannot be overstated given he was having to learn a new car that was fundamentally different to the old GP2 machine. On top of that, when he was back, he went down a rabbit warren of set-up issues in the early part of the 2018 season, trying to combat a car that didn't suit his driving style.

The biggest blot on his CV is the lack of a GP2/F2 pole position

By the end of round eight of last season, at the Hungaroring, Latifi was 13th in the championship, while team-mate Albon lay third and was in title contention. It was a nightmare for a driver who was supposed to emerge a star that year, alongside an F1 testing programme with Force India.

But that ruined season and the myriad mistakes made in setting up the car arguably provided the toughening-up he needed. After that Hungaroring weekend, Latifi recovered to finish in the top five for four of the next five races, and off that springboard he is second in the 2019 standings with only this weekend's Abu Dhabi finale remaining.

The Canadian will move from a series that counts Albon, Leclerc, Norris and Russell - all prodigious talents - among its alumni. Maybe, just maybe, the lessons he learned in 2018 can help promote Latifi onto the same higher plane.

"In general, my driving style was always quite aggressive - I'm quite late on the brakes," explains Latifi, speaking earlier in 2019. "The way our car [the old Dallara GP2/11] was in '17 allowed for that and, if anything, it spoilt me.

"With this car [the new Dallara F2 2018], from very early on last year I wasn't getting the same feeling and we weren't able to match that feeling from the 2017 car. At a certain point, nothing was working so I took a really hard look in the mirror.

"It was clearly me not driving it properly, because Alex was able to do it and we had polar opposite driving styles, I'd say the most different of all my team-mates. It was enlightening because it was an even bigger slap in the face that he was getting the results and I wasn't. He was probably the team-mate I learned the most from in my junior single-seater career."

Latifi is that rare breed of driver who, when the heat of the moment has cleared and the analytical thought process sets in, can really dig deep and work on his own performance without the trappings of being too arrogant. He knows he didn't help the 2018 situation, and he's spent the year and a half since then working with DAMS to rectify the situation.

Although 2019 hasn't gone to plan either, and Nyck de Vries has already sealed the title, there were key moments that went against Latifi. De Vries has managed to go fairly fortuitously to the F2 title - not to take away from the Dutchman's performance, but take the farcical Monaco red-flag situation that led to Latifi being one of many stranded off the lead lap and finishing outside the points, while de Vries won.

At the Red Bull Ring, Latifi was spun by team-mate Sergio Sette Camara, and at Monza he came out on the wrong end of a dice with Guan Yu Zhou. The points all add up, but there have only been two weekends where Latifi has lacked pace all year; the rest have been impressive.

Even so, the biggest blot on his CV is the lack of a GP2/F2 pole position.

Despite the cosmetic damage the poor junior results may have done to his reputation with the general motorsport fanbase, Latifi is undecided when asked if he'd change any part of his recent second-tier rollercoaster ride. And that shows the belief he has in his own ability.

"In hindsight, it's something that I try and look at as a positive - that it happened now," says Latifi. "For sure, last year, of course I would have preferred to get the results straight away and fight for the championship.

"But the way I analyse it is, there was something I was missing at the start of last year, clearly, in my... let's call it 'driver toolbox'. I wasn't able to do it consistently. In Formula 1 the car can be different every year. I've driven so many Formula 1 cars now, a lot of the time they have inherent tendencies that it doesn't matter which track you go to, they would feel the same. Some good, some bad.

"If the car last year was like the 2017 car, I would have won the F2 championship and then arrived in Formula 1 with a team that maybe wasn't competitive. So, would I have been able to adapt straight away in Formula 1? Probably not. There's even more pressure. The cars are even quicker and on even more of a knife edge. It could have been a one-and-done year."

Williams has seen something more than cash in Latifi

There's no doubt Latifi hasn't been at the level of the Leclercs and Russells of the world on a regular basis, and that - coupled with the fact that it is anticipated he will bring a chunky budget via his family's successful businesses - means some onlookers will add that together and think 'pay driver'.

But his willingness to dig deep and look inwardly is not as common in F1 as you may expect, and that could be a key building block for Latifi having a successful career.

After all, he is joining a team currently performing poorly: Williams. Russell has done an Alonso-at-Minardi style job in reinforcing his reputation at the flailing team, but there's no doubt Williams is expected to be better next year.

Some would argue that taking options such as Lance Stroll, Sergey Sirotkin and Robert Kubica in recent seasons has played a part in Williams's downturn. But all three of those drivers did acceptable jobs. Like Latifi almost certainly will, the trio brought funding injections. But he adds a mix of youth and junior career hardship - he's not quite had the same gilded path to F1 as Stroll did, for instance.

It is unclear whether Williams banked on Latifi as early in the year as it did with Russell (who was signed in August 2018), but some rumours indicate the deal for Latifi was done at Paul Ricard back in June.

While it would have been tough to persuade Nico Hulkenberg to join Williams for 2020, drivers of his calibre were and are on the table, and Williams isn't stupid. It will have analysed its deals with Stroll, Sirotkin and Kubica to work out where they could have been better before it signed Latifi - who, by the way, has always received glowing reviews from the F1 teams he has tested for.

Williams has seen something more than cash in him, and now he must deliver against a prodigious talent in Russell. It's lucky, then, that he's had some practice in dealing with difficulty.