Williams confirms pit lane start for Stroll, Sirotkin

Lance Stroll and Sergey Sirotkin will both start Sunday's British Grand Prix from the pit lane after Williams was forced to make specification changes to their cars overnight due to a rear aerodynamic issue.

Stroll and Sirotkin both experienced high-speed spins during qualifying on Saturday after losing the rears of the car. Stroll spun into the gravel under braking at Brooklands and was unable to set a time in the session, while Sirotkin could only finish 18th after hauling his car out of the gravel.

The team was considering a switch back to its previous-spec rear wing and floor, which would force both drivers to start the race from the pit lane, with the move being confirmed on Sunday ahead of the race.

Following the issues we saw in qualifying we will be making some changes to the cars ahead of the race. This will now require both our drivers to start from the pitlane as per the regulations.#BritishGP #F1

— WILLIAMS RACING (@WilliamsRacing) July 8, 2018

“We brought in some new pieces yesterday and we need to do more work, but the presumption is that we have an intermittent problem with the floor stall related only to DRS, so it only happens when you use the DRS and it doesn’t recover well enough for the subsequent corner," Williams technical boss Paddy Lowe explained on Saturday evening.

"We can only assume now that it’s related to the new pieces even though we did a proper introduction and seem to have a stable platform as we showed in P2 yesterday."

Both Stroll and Sirotkin will start with Brendon Hartley in the pit lane, who crashed out at high-speed during FP3 on Saturday following a suspension failure on his Toro Rosso, forcing a change in survival cell on his STR13 car ahead of the race.