Robert Shwartzman is currently chasing his dream to win the championship title in his second year in Formula 2.
The Russian driver delivered four wins and ten podiums in his rookie year, on his way to finishing fourth in the driver championship.
This year, he remains with the Prema Racing team, a team he has been with for four years.
2021 will be his second season in the series, and he is feeling comfortable with the continued partnership with the Italian team.
“I’m happy to continue working with them. I have got so used to the people here, so it’s just like a complete standard situation for me to be around, it is just like family.”
Oscar Piastri, the FIA F3 champion, will be driving alongside him as his new teammate. Shwartzman mentioned that having the Australian driver inside the team will motivate him.
“I’m actually happy that he’s my teammate, I think he’s a very strong guy and I think he’s going to motivate me a lot to push and to work hard. I’m confident that I can beat him, I will do my best to do it.”
“As we know, he’s a very strong driver, and he’s very competitive. Therefore, it’s going to be a very interesting competition between us.”
Having collected the most wins, more than any driver on the grid, Shwartzman doesn’t feel that he gave everything last year.
“It wasn’t a bad year and a bad season. I think it’s pretty positive for a rookie, but I’m not really satisfied with how it went. I have that sort of feeling that we could’ve done a much better job and at least to fight for the title until the end. But something went wrong, and we lost quite a lot of points.”
“But now it’s in the past, and I hope this year I can manage to put everything together and to deliver that final result by taking the championship.”
Reflecting on his previous results to be considered as the favorite, he didn’t feel any certainty to top the season instantly.
“This year, we’ll start from zero again. It’s my second year, and I have experience from last year. It’s going to be a different because we start everything from zero, so it doesn’t matter where I finished last year.”
Heading over to Bahrain as the season opener, he believes that he’s capable of winning races.
The last time Bahrain hosted a race for Formula 2, he managed to get some good results, consistently staying inside the top ten.
He puts a lot of confidence in delivering better performances by the possibilities of having the quickest car on the grid.
“It’s a difficult track because it takes a lot of effort with tires. I know we can do better, I can drive better, and the team could do a better job preparing the car for it because we can have the quickest car there.”
“But it’s not the track that I hate, and I sort of understand that quite well enough to perform well there, to perform really good, and to be capable of winning races.”
Nevertheless, we will still have to wait for the first round of Formula 2 to see Robert Shwartzman progress in his quest for the championship this year.
