Stroll: Felipe is not here. He's gone, he's retired

Massa retired from F1 last year leaving Williams to fill his place with rookie Sergey Sirotkin who brought money to the team, while Stroll is also paying for driving in the team. The Brazilian claiming that his former team were paying the price for focusing too much on the money in their decision-making process.

When asked for a response to Massa's comments, Stroll said, "First of all, Felipe is not here. He's gone, he's retired."

"The last time I looked, I finished a position behind Felipe and not using Felipe as a reference, but using myself as a reference. I look back to where I was last year when the car was better. In China, I was in Q3. In other races, many races, I was scoring points."

"It's not like I know I can not do that, that's not possible ... The problem today is that with a really competitive and good race, we're in 14th or 13th. Last year, we were comfortably at the points many times. That's how I see it," explained the 19-year-old.

Stroll has not spared his own team criticism for the FW41 he and his teammate are struggling to come to terms with, but at the same time believe has not lost hope, "Our goal is to cure some of these problems, and if we can do that, I definitely believe we can be much more competitive."

"We have had a bit of inactivity in recent weeks to understand some of our problems. I think coming this weekend we can have a different direction with the car and the hit, and we hope that makes things a little better."

Last year in Baku, Stroll delivered one of his best performances on his way to a well deserved third place.

He knows it will be a tough ask for a repeat perfromance this time around, "Definitely the nature of the circuit is very fast, many long lines. Those long straight lines were our strength last year. Unfortunately, a little weakness this year."

"There is no reason why we can not score points here in Baku. I do not think we would compete if we did not believe we could," added Stroll.