 Williams, who regularly struggled to attract funding, hired Formula 2 racer Sergey Sirotkin in 2018 to pair with Stroll; the move raised doubts from critics due to Sirotkin's inexperience compared to the popular Robert Kubica, prompting team principal Claire Williams to denounce the pay driver label as "unfair".Kubica himself was then labelled with the tag when he took over from Siroktin as his own seat was funded by a large sponsorship deal from Orlen.Although occasionally pay driver are amongst labelled as "unworthy" for an F1 ride, many of the pay drivers in F1 today come with occasional success in their individual races in lower formulas.