Carlos Sainz says that Williams has a good car but they aren’t executing things properly to maximise race weekends, as he pins on upgrade to come.
Having started out on a good note, Williams has suffered in the last few rounds, whether on the reliability front or strategy and or pace. They lost crucial points, especially to Sauber, who have caught up well in those last races. The big hit has been on the reliability end on Alexander Albon’s side.
He has retired in three of the last four rounds, while Carlos Sainz has had two non-points finish and one DNS in the same period. They found solution to Albon’s issue, but it hasn’t been fixed 100% – they are running a compromised set-up to get through the races.
The people at Grove are working day and night as well to get things sorted for the races. “I understand now why it happened and it shouldn’t happen again,” said Sainz. “The issue on Alex’s car that has happened a few in a row is something that obviously we are trying to solve and trying to understand and for that we are doing everything we can to understand because it’s a very strange issue that only happens on race day.
“We only see it happening on race day, so you cannot simulate it at certain points of the weekend, even though we try our best but we’ll keep working on it. It is very hectic for sure for the whole factory, for us as drivers and all the engineers involved. We’re trying our best to get on top of all these issues and situations and one thing that is keeping us calm and encouraged is that the speed of the car is there.
“I’m very confident we could have won the midfield battle in Austria – lets say – even almost starting from the back with the pace we had. Every race we are actually very quick and we have a very competitive car, but we just need to start putting things together and making no mistakes as a team, which I think it will happen,” summed up Sainz.
He feels that the team has to execute better to maximise race weekends after falling short in some of them. They will have an update in the coming races, but it was planned long back and not to address any of the current issues. Going back to reliability, Sainz noted on their competitive car stressing the parts a lot more than it did last year.
It has allowed them to learn about their car more, as they know where they have to work for 2026. “First of all we also have an upgrade coming but it was developed a long time ago, so the car, this year’s car, even though it hasn’t been developed based on our feedback from testing and the first few races there’s an upgrade in the pipeline that has been there for a while,” said Sainz.
“So we are also encouraged by that. We are just not going to keep falling back for sure and at the same time that’s the thing, even if we haven’t developed the car, I’m extremely confident that both Canada and Austria, even Barcelona, we could have caught a point if we execute things well, even Monaco, there’s all these consecutive weekends in a row where the car potential and the speed of the team, the two drivers, has been much higher than the results that we’ve achieved.
“So we just know that we just need to do normal weekends like we were doing at the beginning of the season and it will come. Also, I think as a team a more competitive car is for sure stressing a bit the system of the way we do things and the way we work and having a car that this year we’ve been able even to fight at times like Red Bull, Mercedes, even Ferrari in Miami and Imola, it has exposed not only our reliability issues but also the way we look at strategy, the way we look at Q1s and Q2s and the way we execute the weekend, it’s given us a great opportunity to actually learn a lot of the things we might or we could learn next year with a more competitive car.
“But thanks to this much more competitive car this year that’s already given us a bit of a heads up on everything that we need to improve and the margin of improvement that we have in so many areas if we want to fight the guys at the top. So it’s been a great test for the team, it’s been a painful one because obviously you see a car that can’t get points almost every weekend and we keep finding different little things that don’t allow us to maybe get all the points that we see we could get but it’s the trajectory and the path that we are on and as I said before we are stressing the system to know exactly where do we need to get to be championship level,” summed up Sainz.
Here’s Carlos Sainz on pre-joining expectations
Here’s Williams pair on British GP
