Carlos Sainz makes 'very tough' admission after Williams 'failures'

Carlos Sainz has conceded Williams is still "failing" in multiple areas that are required to produce a competitive F1 car.

While reflecting on the "very tough winter" for the Grove-based squad, the Spanish driver was nevertheless optimistic that the team can return to the heights of 2025 by the end of the campaign ahead.

Last season, Williams defied expectations to finish fifth in the constructors’ standings, scoring 137 points.

Sainz himself secured two podium finishes and a sprint top three to cap off what was very much a year of two halves, following a slow start to life with the team.

However, much of that progress has already been undone by the regulations reset, as Williams experiences the ebbs and flows of recovering from recent obscurity to competitiveness.

"We do the same calculations but with a little more information, and we have an approximation of where we stand," Sainz explained to Mundo Deportivo.

"But the reality is that until we unload the cars with full tanks of gas in Australia and everyone pushes the engine to its limits, we won’t really know where we are.

"Realistically speaking — and I always like to be realistic in that sense — we’re not where we were last year."

Making 'silly mistakes'

Williams missed the entire private shakedown in Barcelona at the end of January, but was able to make up some lost ground during the two official pre-season tests at the Bahrain International Circuit, clocking in 748 laps across the six days of running.

Despite the difficult position it finds itself in, with the FW48 rumoured to be notably over the 768kg minimum weight limit, Sainz is hopeful the team can be back to where it was in the pecking order by the end of the year.

"The car is very new, it’s still green, and we’re going to improve it in every way," the four-time grand prix winner said.

"As you’ve all seen, it’s been a very tough winter for the team, but that doesn’t mean that how the first race goes will set the tone for the whole season.

"It’s going to be a season where we’ll develop the car a lot, both the car itself and the engines, and we’ll see what level we reach at the end of the season.

"We’d like to be at least where we were at the end of last year, or even better."

Analysing the situation at the nine-time F1 constructors' champions, Sainz shared that there are "two or three things" where the team is still falling short of where it needs to be to cap off its return to the sharp end of the grid.

"I think everyone in the F1 world expected that a change in regulations could help teams that aren’t yet at the level of the top teams to get closer," he explained.

"And perhaps, as has always happened historically in Formula 1, the teams that are already well-oiled and well-prepared take advantage of the regulation change to take a big step forward.

"On the other hand, the teams that are still a bit underdeveloped, as you want to say, end up making mistakes, silly things, which are the things that make you learn as a team what you still need to be a top team, and that’s where we are.

"This year, we’ve realised that we’re still failing in two or three things that are key when it comes to producing a top Formula 1 car, and we’ve learned from that this winter and we’ll apply it going forward."