Lance Stroll had a private test in a 2014 Williams at Austin's Circuit of the Americas a week after scoring the first points of his Formula One career at the Canadian Grand Prix.
Stroll built on that Montreal breakthrough with the best qualifying performance of his rookie campaign in Baku, where he beat teammate Felipe Massa to eighth on the grid. While Massa had a couple of messy runs during Q2 and Q3, Stroll looked much smoother and finished 0.04s up on the Brazilian driver.
It marked another encouraging step for the young Canadian, who had a tough start to his rookie campaign. The 18-year-old entered F1 after a series of private tests funded by father Lawrence last year but failed to score a point until his seventh race.
After qualifying, Williams' chief technical officer Paddy Lowe revealed Stroll has enjoyed some invaluable track time since his ninth-place finish in Montreal to work on finding an optimial set-up.
"They made some changes, they did some work with him," Lowe explained when asked to clarify how Stroll's set-up has changed since Canada. "We went to Austin last week for driving the 2014 car so did a few experiments there with set-up, looking at the differences between his set-up and Felipe's set-up. Some of that has been brought forward here and I think that's put him in a much better place.
"[The changes are] generic things that are common to most racing cars actually, just around how we've got the car configured, which definitely helped him."
Several drivers have fallen foul of Baku's tricky street circuit this weekend and Lowe pointed out that Stroll has not been one of them, further emphasising how the team believes he has improved since Canada.
"Certainly Lance is in great form this weekend and it's clear that, as we hoped from his result in Canada, the confidence he took from there has carried through to this weekend. He's been absolutely spot-on in every session.
"[On Friday] there was only three drivers that didn't set a yellow and one of them was Lance. And then you'd say 'was he going quickly?' and yes, he was pushing, just not falling off. It's a difficult circuit, so to push here and leave the right margin is really tough."
One issue Stroll struggled with early in this campaign was tyre warm-up -- notably getting his tyres up to temperature in a limited window in order to maximise performance. This has been a key feature of the Azerbaijan Grand Prix weekend so far and Stroll is confident his impressive start to the weekend demonstrates that he is making progress.
"This weekend for sure I've felt really on it with laps, knowing when is the right time to push or not. I feel like I've made a step on my wide this weekend in that area for sure," Stroll said. "So I'm really happy about that and it's a combination of everyone working together, the engineers giving me better information and getting more experience with the tyres."
The teenager also hinted that his COTA test had helped the team move back towards a set-up he was more comfortable with earlier in the season.
"There's a combination of reasons why. Myself, improving on areas I needed to improve on, I think I'm starting to figure it out, and also with the car taking directions similar to the beginning of the year -- we drifted away from that direction and I feel a lot more confident and comfortable with that set-up. Everything has been going well this weekend and that brings the result."