Carlos Sainz has revealed Williams is undergoing a thorough process to ensure the “extreme” and “peculiar” weaknesses that have long plagued the team aren’t prevalent in the car that it debuts under Formula 1’s new 2026 rules.
Sainz’s arrival has coincided with Williams revelling in an upturn in fortunes that has seen the team accumulate more points with eight rounds remaining in 2025 than it had during the past seven campaigns combined.
However, Sainz has seldom been able to capitalise on the Grove-based squad’s renewed competitiveness as incidents, botched strategies and technical gremlins have all conspired to limit him to just 16 points, 54 less than team-mate Alex Albon.
But while the points gap between the duo is among the largest on the grid, the head-to-head over one lap standing at eight apiece shows that Sainz hasn’t lost his raw speed.
That being said, two-thirds into his maiden campaign with Williams, Sainz has admitted that he is still not at one with the FW47 due to certain restrictions with the car that he has been unable to overcome through his own driving or alternative set-up directions.
When asked what he considers the most important thing to achieve over the closing rounds, Sainz told Motorsport Week in an exclusive interview: “Executing weekends. I know I have the speed with the car. I don’t feel particularly at home with it. The car has some weaknesses that I cannot drive around them or I cannot tune a set-up to get rid of those weaknesses. And you need to drive the car in a very particular way to do a maximum lap, the best possible lap time and it doesn’t particularly suit my driving style in that way.”
Providing his luck does turn around, though, Sainz has no doubt that he can contribute the essential points to ensure Williams holds fifth position in the Constructors’ standings.
“But I know that even with those weaknesses I can be quick,” he continued. “I’ve been quick from the get-go in Bahrain. I adapt and I can be quick. Not to the levels of maybe doing something magic with the car because I’m lacking still a bit of feeling and experience with the car, but quick enough.
“So my target is just to make sure that when we are quick enough or quick like we’ve been in Miami, in Imola – the weekends where we had good chances to get good points – we get the good points and the top five, top sixes that we got at the beginning.”
What Williams is lacking compared to the top F1 teams
The remarkable improvement that Williams produced over the winter put the team in condition to even rival Ferrari at certain races earlier in the season, with Sainz and Albon both lining up inside the top seven at the Miami and Emilia Romagna Grands Prix. However, there have still been the occasional weekends when either driver has been susceptible to a premature Q1 elimination.
Sainz has attributed such fluctuations in performance weekend-to-weekend to limitations that have remained embedded in the team’s cars since this rules cycle began. And with Williams endeavouring to utilise the impending overhaul to narrow the gap to the leading quartet, Sainz has acknowledged how imperative it is that the side establishes where the long-standing hindrances stem from as it assembles the FW47’s successor.
Put to him that next season’s reset is a chance to start with a clean slate, Sainz countered: “Well, first, we are in the process of identifying why this car has those weaknesses. Where is it on the aero map? Where is it on the suspensions, the settings?
“What is out of these things or in the tools of the car, where is the hidden thing that is making the car have such peculiar weaknesses that are so extreme to the point where in Hungary you are almost a second off pole position from a Ferrari, but then in Miami and Imola we were, if anything, quicker than them?
“So it must be something very big that we are not understanding and capturing and, while we are designing next year’s car, we are trying to understand what’s wrong with this car and its predecessors, because the ‘22, ‘23, ‘24 car also had it. What’s been intrinsic of a Williams car that always gives this relative weakness to the competition?”
READ MORE – Why Carlos Sainz’s debut F1 year with Williams has been ‘everything but good so far’
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