Carlos Sainz details Williams struggles: 'I could smell it coming'

Carlos Sainz has detailed that he could sense Williams' struggles coming in the build-up to the new F1 season under fresh technical regulations.

The F1 cars this year were subject to major change as both the power unit and aerodynamics underwent a shift.

Williams has long targeted the regulation change as an opportunity to take a step forward up the pecking order and hoped to build on its fifth place in the standings last year.

However, it missed the opening shakedown test and has since been operating with an overweight car, leaving it languishing down the pecking order.

The Spaniard has admitted the scale of the struggle has caught the team by surprise.

“For sure, it's been a shock for me, for the team, for James, for Alex, for all the engineers,” Sainz told media including RacingNews365.

“It’s no secret that it's been tough. I could already smell it coming in December or January.

“I started bracing for for the bump, because we already started having these conversations of delays, not arriving to that first test. I started hearing the overweight numbers, and I said, ‘it doesn't look very promising to start’.”

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Sainz backs Williams to develop out of 'bump'

Williams currently sit ninth in the standings after three rounds, with Sainz managing to pick up two points at the Chinese Grand Prix.

While its performance has left it far from mixing it up with the top squads, Sainz is confident Williams can develop its way out of its current situation.

“Fom the beginning of the bump, I knew at some point Williams was going to hit a bump,” he said.

“Not all the roads to success are linear, there was always going to be a bump. This bump is big, probably even bigger than what I expected.

“Now it's about resilience and how you recover from the bump.

“If this bump is going to help to eliminate all the bad things that the team had intrinsic into the way we were doing the production, into the way we were doing the design, into the way we were delivering overweight chassis or overweight components, if this is going to kill the little viruses that we had as a team and we recover well from this, then it could create the opposite effect, a big, big jump in performance.

“So for me now it’s seeing, analysing and observing the way that we are able to jump back from a bump that was much bigger than everyone expected.”