The one shining light from Williams's current pain

So much has been made of Williams's terrible start to the 2019 Formula 1 season that adding even more paragraphs about its current predicament feels like just piling on the misery.

After all, nobody will be more aware of the situation than those working at the team, nobody will feel the pain more keenly and nobody will work harder to turn it around.

But for context, here's a recap of its year to date. The new FW42 was late to the pre-season and has been slow enough to add a 'Class C' to the 2019 grid. Its every rival is competitive enough to fight for points, meaning that even if Williams does force itself into the top 10 at some point, whatever points it picks up will not be enough to spare it from finishing 10th in the constructors' and taking a prize money hit.

The big-money tech chief signing who was supposed to usher in a new era for the team has been sidelined. Robert Kubica, a widely-beloved driver at the centre of an inspiring comeback story, seems disgruntled already, and his backers can't be far behind.

During the recent Azerbaijan Grand Prix weekend, the Baku track conspired to rub salt into the Williams wound, as a loose manhole cover wrote off a chassis for George Russell. Kubica then crashed in qualifying, and paddock rumours had it that he came very close to writing off another one. Had the FW42's survival cell been damaged in the crash, Williams might have been limited to just the one car in the race...

But amid all that, Williams's other driver - rookie Russell - emerged with enormous credit to his name. In Baku, he shrugged off both a pre-weekend illness - "shivering one minute, sweating the next, no energy at all" - and the manhole cover incident to deliver an assured performance in qualifying and the race itself, both keeping well out of trouble and getting as much as is reasonably expected from the FW42.

Not only was Russell the bright spot in a bruising Azerbaijan GP weekend for Williams, his arrival has been the one undeniable positive of a pretty miserable campaign so far.

Was Russell high on Williams' shopping list last year? You'd imagine so, although the way it was presented was that Russell sought out the team, through Paddy Lowe, and not the other way around. But the 2018 Formula 2 champion's proactive approach, and endearing PowerPoint presentation sales pitch, were surely not an overriding factor - and Williams naming him as its first signing for '19 was a clear show of faith.

So far, this faith has paid off. All through Williams's curtailed pre-season and into the first four races of his F1 career, Russell has diligently gone about his business, keeping his FW42 crucially intact to avoid further financial and engineering burdens on the team while it plays catch-up following its delayed start.

He's also been reliably ahead of Kubica. Russell is 4-0 up in the qualifying head-to-head, finished a lap ahead in the first two races, 16 seconds clear in China and half a minute in front in Azerbaijan - although this is where an asterisk comes in.

Kubica, after all, has been adamant that his FW42 is different to Russell's - which the Briton has more or less corroborated - and that the current gap between them is not representative. If this is the case, it makes any direct comparison more or less meaningless, although it also suggests that Russell should've got more out of the car in qualifying in Bahrain and China - where he only bested Kubica by the narrowest of margins.

"I'm enjoying the challenge. I feel quite a lot of responsibility to try and turn the team around" George Russell

Whatever the true state of the intra-team Williams battle, which we'll likely only know once the team has fully escaped its early-2019 funk, Russell has long made it clear that getting one over Kubica is not his priority in the current situation.

"It's not my number one objective," he explains. "From a personal level you always want to be quicker than your team-mate, that's the only real comparison you have. But I'd much prefer to be fighting with him further up the grid, or fighting other cars rather than just one another."

Such an approach has been part of Russell's team player - and maybe even 'team leader' - stance, as the rookie has immediately recognised his role in keeping the Williams together and its staff motivated through the hardships. And while there's plenty to be negative about right now, for Russell there is little to be gained from showing gloom or despair.

"Obviously after every session you come in and sometimes you are disappointed or pissed off," he says. "But nobody here wants to be in that position and everybody's doing their best to give us the best possibility of an opportunity. It's really important from my side just to keep everybody motivated because nobody wants to be in this position."

One person who clearly doesn't want to be in this position is Kubica, and compared to Russell he has been noticeably blunter and more critical in his assessment of Williams's current predicament.

This is understandable. Even taking aside the possible differences between the packages Kubica and Russell have at their disposal, their career situations are hardly comparable.

Kubica's 2019 season represents his second chance in F1 after a long and arduous road back, and at 34 time is not on his side if he is to make another impact in grand prix racing. There is also that whole 'carrying a nation's hopes on his shoulders' thing, which will be keenly felt by Poland's biggest-ever motorsport star.

Then again, Russell will be keenly aware that it is not always easy to break through from a backmarker F1 role, and that a young driver's career can easily stagnate. After all, the two most-recent examples of Mercedes-backed drivers who began their F1 careers in uncompetitive machinery - former Manor team-mates Pascal Wehrlein and Esteban Ocon - are both not on the current grid.

Russell has dismissed this particular concern in the past, and insists that there's satisfaction to be found in helping Williams rebuild.

"To be honest I'm enjoying the challenge," he says. "It's sort of a very different role for me. My task at the moment is to direct the team and point them in the right areas where we need to focus, and I feel quite a lot of responsibility to try and turn the team around and get us back to where Williams belong.

"I'm enjoying that aspect of it, but it's just a shame that it's not a quick process, these things just always take time."

Perhaps one reason why Russell has been able to keep his composure amid Williams's travails is the fact that his path to F1 was not as straightforward as his trophy cabinet and Mercedes backing suggests.

Back in 2014, Russell was part of the same crop of single-seater debutants as Max Verstappen and Charles Leclerc. He tasted success right away - winning the BRDC Formula 4 (now F3) title that same year - but while there was never much doubt that either Verstappen or Leclerc were making it to F1, the same was not true for Russell.

Did this help him avoid a shock to the system when he switched from winning regularly at top F2 outfit ART Grand Prix to back-of-the-grid Williams? Russell suggests as much.

"It's not my first difficult year," he says. "Also my last year in karting [2013] was very difficult, I sort of went to a team which wasn't performing at the time. I saw it as a win-win situation - if I performed it'd look great on me and if I didn't, people would just blame it on the equipment.

During his F3 tenure, Russell seemed destined for DTM

"You can call them 'character-building' seasons. I also had that in Formula 3, my two seasons in Formula 3 were far from perfect, and that sort of made me into the driver I am today, and I learned a huge amount from those moments."

Neither of Russell's F3 campaigns were anywhere near a disaster. In his first year, he was part of a six-car Carlin roster and finished sixth overall, as the second-best driver within the team, beaten only by the vastly more experienced Antonio Giovinazzi. In year two, he led new team Hitech and finished third in the championship, best of the rest behind two drivers from the all-conquering Prema outfit that at the time hadn't lost a title in that form of F3.

But when a driver doesn't boast huge financial backing, such campaigns don't normally become building blocks for an F1 future. Not when Russell won just three times in 63 F3 starts - compared to four in 33 for Leclerc, 10 in 32 for Verstappen, 15 in 61 for Lance Stroll.

"Sometimes if you have just such a perfect career path, when you do have a difficulty, you don't know how to handle it," Russell continues. "I've had a number of difficult moments in my career, so I've sort of got the experience on that hand."

During his F3 tenure, Russell seemed destined, for all intents and purposes, for the DTM, admitting back then that "F1 is very tough to get into and I don't have the backing behind me to get there". His 2014 McLaren Autosport BRDC Award win - which Russell now says "had a massive impact on my career" - led to BMW inviting him to a rookie test, and he began to explicitly target a future in the German touring car championship.

Ultimately, he was picked up by Mercedes instead, and went on to win back-to-back GP3 and F2 titles under the Silver Arrows' patronage to earn his way onto the F1 grid. But having had few guarantees on his career path, Russell therefore might have an easier time appreciating the chance even while Williams is far off the pace.

Russell's impressive first steps into F1 tie into another positive aspect for Williams, which is that the team can realistically expect to hang on to him past 2019. He seems mentally geared up to pay his dues at the back of the grid and claims to cherish the task at hand, but it also helps that there's no obvious alternative right now.

After all, Valtteri Bottas seems to be inexorably marching towards another contract renewal at Mercedes, and when it comes to Mercedes-backed drivers Ocon should still - in theory - have priority over Russell if an opportunity arises at either the works team or somewhere further up on the grid than Williams.

Perhaps it would be better for Williams if Russell had no prior affiliations, but then he'd be a lot less limited in terms of alternative options. The Mercedes link might mean he won't be expecting to stay for the longer term, but for now he can offer some stability on the driver front to a team that looks like it could very much use some.

Whatever changes are on F1's horizon for 2021, it's clear Williams has to begin getting itself back on track right now. But returning to a level of performance that it can be happy with will be not a moment's task. Until that happens, its employees will have to find job satisfaction from other sources.

And on current evidence, the team's new recruit - with his performances and his attitude - can be one such source.