Troubled by doubts about his early season performances, Brazilian Bruno Senna believes he can secure his future with the Williams team if he repeats the form that carried him to seventh in last Sunday's Hungarian Grand Prix.
The nephew of legendary three-times champion Ayrton Senna, Bruno has struggled in qualifying for most of the season and been outpaced by his Williams team-mate Venezuelan Pastor Maldonado.
But he senses that, with some consistency and luck, he can follow his top-ten qualifying display at the Hungaroring with a spell of more consistent form.
He said: "The only reason why we scored good points in Hungary is because we qualified well, and we need to keep on doing it.
"Everybody needs opportunities to grow up and this is mine. I need an opportunity to grow up and develop with the team.
"It's probably the hardest season in Formula 1 for who knows how many years. With a tenth of a second you can be five or six positions up.
"In the races, I think I'm doing pretty well this season. As I said before, nailing qualifying will be the key to make sure I stay for next year and hopefully the next few years."
Senna believes the Hungarian weekend was his best this year and admitted he felt far more optimistic about his future as he headed off for the sport's summer break.
He said: "I think we had a strong weekend overall, and it's important to keep on pushing like that. Definitely if I had come out of the weekend with a bad result or with poor pace, you come into the break with something in the back of your mind.
"I have nothing to worry about now. I think we had a strong performance overall, and I'm learning, I'm improving and it's going to be a case of chipping away and in the second half of the season I'll have much more experience and everything helps."
He added that he believes Williams can continue to make progress in the upcoming races, as the team knows what is the best direction for the development of its car.
"You need to keep pushing and improving. We know the team has potential. We know the direction to push the car for the next few races. There's a clear development path.
"It's just great to have a car that's a top-10 finisher pretty much every race and every time you don't finish in the top 10 is mostly because of something else happened."
