Williams boss James Vowles is ready to draw “a line in the sand” as Carlos Sainz‘s misfiring debut Formula 1 season with the team is expected to come good.
Vowles was hailed across the paddock when he convinced the four-time Grand Prix winner to sign up for a rebuild project at the Grove-based squad last year.
Alongside Alex Albon, the Madrid-born driver was expected to not only drive the FW47’s development but also pull the team forward and up the pecking order from his experiences with the likes of McLaren and Ferrari.
But 12 rounds into the season, the 30-year-old has found it difficult to adapt to life back in the midfield.
His team-mate has had more than the measure of Sainz, scoring 46 points so far as compared to the Spaniard’s paltry 13.
Vowles, who admits that the team is also to blame for this tepid run of form, has urged his driver to take the onus on himself, too.
“With Carlos, I think we haven’t delivered everything we can with him this year,” he said.
“And it’s been a mixture all across the board. There’s been errors that he’s made on track. There’s absolutely been the errors that we’ve made on track.
“There’s been accidents. There’s been just accumulation of aspects.”
The opening five races of the 2025 season saw Sainz DNF twice. It was only in Saudi Arabia that the 30-year-old scored his first points for Williams with an eighth-place finish.
And though he has maintained a points-scoring streak since, his general pace has not been commensurate with that of his team-mate, but Vowles expects Sainz to turn a page from the Belgian Grand Prix onwards.
“For me, it’s about drawing a line in the sand and moving forward from Spa onwards,” asserted Vowles.
“We have a number of really good races coming up for us.
“It’s about delivering the result that the car has in it, making sure that we start to really focus in on why we’re not getting everything out of qualifying and dig into that and get the best performance possible.”
“For Carlos, it’s achieving the results that I know we are capable of together, which we haven’t done this year.”
The key to Williams’ second half of the 2025 season
Exactly halfway into the season, Williams currently sits fifth in the Constructors’ Championship, en route to the team’s best finish since the 2017 season.
Yet, the advantage over the likes of Sauber and Racing Bulls is fragile, and Vowles admits that the team needs to focus on both development and executing perfect race weekends to keep ahead of its rivals.
“We’re now about midway and obviously had a very strong start and have then fallen away a little bit as others have added performance to their car,” conceded the Briton.
“Now, we have a small update coming to Spa. What we really have to do there is make sure that we capitalize on the car performance that we have available to us.
“There’s still points that we can score from here to the end of the year; it’s making sure that we execute the weekends and take every opportunity that comes towards us.”
To achieve this, however, the 46-year-old needs his driver line-up to be firing on all cylinders.
“In the case of Alex, it’s building on what we did at the beginning of the year and making sure we recognise we’ve fallen back a little bit,” he added.
“But [we need to] move forward with the car performance and make sure we start to extract everything out of qualifying that we can.
“[We need to allow] him to continue that point score tally that he’s built up so well across the first half of the season.”
READ MORE – Why Carlos Sainz’s debut F1 year with Williams has been ‘everything but good so far’
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