Carlos Sainz shares Williams update after 'eye-opening' F1 season

Carlos Sainz has admitted that Williams' campaign has fallen well short of his expectations, describing it as a "character-building year" and "an eye-opener" as F1 heads into its summer shutdown.

The Spaniard joined Williams from Ferrari ahead of the 2025 season as the marquee signing in James Vowles' long-term rebuild of the Grove-based outfit.

That first year together exceeded all expectations, with the team finishing fifth in the constructors' championship on 137 points, its best result since 2017, including two podiums for Sainz.

Yet 2026 has told a very different story. Williams deliberately pivoted early towards the new regulations, sacrificing late-2025 development in the hope of stealing a march on the competition.

Instead, the FW48 arrived significantly overweight and lacking downforce, with crash-test failures during the build phase forcing structural compromises that baked in excess mass.

After 11 rounds, the team has mustered just 11 points, six for Sainz and five for Alex Albon. At the same stage last year, it had 55.

Asked ahead of the Hungarian Grand Prix whether he ever expected to have only six points before the summer break, Sainz was candid in reflection.

"No, it wasn't in my plans or in my expectations," the five-time grand prix winner told media, including RacingNews365. "I think I've been very open and very clear about the fact that I think in 2025 we overdelivered and, if anything, the results were better than what I expected when I signed my Williams contract in 2024.

"The 2025 car was a very good car, a car that was sometimes only three or four tenths off pole position, a car where you could feel that the balance was good."

'Further away from the top than we thought'

Sainz had reason to believe that Williams' early commitment to the 2026 regulations would pay dividends. The team redirected significant resource towards the FW48 well ahead of rivals, and the regulation reset was expected to be a launchpad for the next phase of Vowles' rebuild, with hopes of returning to race-winning contention from 2028.

"Obviously, going into 2026, I expected, if anything, with more time to develop the 2026 car and a new set of regulations, that we could potentially either stay where we were or make a small step forward," he added.

"Yet time has proven to me that it has obviously been the opposite, or the other way around, and that as a team we are further away from the top than we thought we were at the end of 2025.

"It's definitely been a character-building year for the whole team, a bit of an eye-opener in terms of how much work there is still to do if we even want to consider fighting with a top team in the future."

Williams' points tally being one-fifth of what it was after the same number of rounds in 2025 underlines the scale of the regression, as the overweight, under-performing FW48 has left both drivers fighting in the lower reaches of the midfield more often than not.

A comprehensive upgrade is scheduled for the Azerbaijan Grand Prix in late September, but Vowles has already conceded it will not be transformative, with the team instead looking to 2027 to recover the ground it has lost this year.

"A lot of things have been learned, a lot of things we've realised, and unfortunately it has been a bad year so far," Sainz said.

"We need to conclude and understand why and what happened. I think we have a pretty good understanding by now.

"The capacity to turn it around is there, but obviously in Formula 1 it takes time. It takes time, effort, budget-cap money and a lot of analysis, and that's exactly where we are right now."