Carlos Sainz expands on what work he could do with Williams in the course of F1 2025 to extract performance amid stablised regulations.
Having joined Williams in the last year of the bygone era, Sainz couldn’t do whole lot to improve the base of the F1 2025 car. But he still had a role to play to help it move up from ninth to fifth in the constructors’ standings and contribute towards the 137 points they scored all-year.
As Sainz has proven in every other team he has raced for, he made good impact immediately. He couldn’t do whole lot, but worked on the set-up which yielded results eventually. Even during the season, the Spaniard highlighted how he undertook hit and trial method with certain set-ups.
He acknowledged that even though things didn’t work initially, but he persisted with it and brought about tweaks to suit the car and circuit, which helped not just him, but also the team to understand various ways to approach challenges and deliver on it.
“On this year more, I think personally more through season set-up development work, from the car that we ran in Bahrain to the car that we’re running now, going around the loop of testing different things and having different ideas to know how to make this car work a bit better,” said Sainz to media. “It was just together with the team brainstorming the things that I like and I don’t like about this car.
“The things that we potentially thought that could work with this car, given the limitations we had. We’ve done many mistakes in the first half of the year by trying things that we thought that could work and didn’t work, but that’s a consequence of Formula 1 not having testing and you need to use race weekends to test [which yielded results as well],” summed up Sainz.
The Spaniard acknowledged the advantage of stabilised regulations, which helped them to experiment things more. If there was evolution in the regulations, they wouldn’t have had the liberty and time to experiment on set-up, since the focus would have been to sort the base package first.
“Yes, this is another thing, one of the advantages of not having too many evolution packages is that the car remains stable through the year,” continued Sainz. “So you don’t have big aero balance or downforce shapes, differences that might affect the mechanical side of things, which is in a year like this let’s say a small positive.
“But at the same time the only thing that makes the car clearly quicker is downforce, so as a driver you also want more downforce and I hope next year we get plenty of good downforce packages because next year everyone’s going to need them,” summed up Sainz.
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