Carlos Sainz grateful for 'Williams pain' ahead of golden F1 opportunity

Carlos Sainz has explained how he is grateful for the "very painful" failures Williams has experienced in the 2025 season.

Williams is enjoying its best F1 season since 2017, sitting in fifth place in the constructors' standings with 59 points at the halfway stage. It is its biggest haul since its 83-point total in 2017. 

Sainz joined Williams from Ferrari for this year after being impressed by the sales pitch James Vowles presented in his rebuilding plans for the nine-time constructors' champions to return to the front of F1.

Williams has taken a surprise step forward in 2025 to enjoy its best results in nearly a decade, with Sainz explaining how the boost in performance, and racing the top teams, is giving the Grove-squad a head-start in learning, and exposing operational procedures and weaknesses for 2026. 

"A more competitive car is stressing the system of how we do things and the way we work," Sainz told the media when asked by RacingNews365 if it was a good thing for Williams to suffer the car failures in 2025 ahead of the rules change for '26.

"At times this year, we've been able to fight Red Bull, Mercedes and even Ferrari in Miami and at Imola, and it has exposed not only our reliability issues, but also the way we look at strategy, at Q1 and Q2 and the way we execute the weekend.

"It is giving us a great opportunity to learn a lot of the things we could learn next year with a more competitive car.

"But thanks to this much more competitive car, it has already given us a heads up on everything we need to improve and the margins of improvement if we want to fight the guys at the front. 

"It is a great test for the team, but a very painful one, because you see a car that can get points almost every weekend, and we keep finding different little things that don't allow us to. 

"We're stressing the system to know exactly where we need to get better to be at a championship-level."