EXCLUSIVE: Sainz on his first season as a Williams driver – and why he feels ‘vindicated’ at the end of it

Carlos Sainz embarked on a new adventure in 2025 when he joined Williams and set about playing a key role in their planned return to winning ways. At the end of a rollercoaster season, which featured early headaches, hard-fought breakthroughs, memorable podium finishes and a remarkable rise to P5 in the Teams’ Championship, he joined F1.com to review it all…

It’s the penultimate round of another busy F1 campaign and, while there’s the small matter of a Drivers’ Championship to be settled between the McLaren duo and Red Bull’s Max Verstappen, plenty of racers up and down the Qatar Grand Prix paddock are already in a reflective mood.

One of those is Sainz, the experienced, multiple Grand Prix winner who was suddenly forced to rethink his career path in early 2024, when Ferrari dropped the bombshell news that they had signed seven-time World Champion Lewis Hamilton as his replacement for 2025 and beyond.

Sainz’s whirlwind first year at Williams

After considering the many options in front of him, Sainz decided that the once-dominant Williams operation represented the best opportunity for success in the short and long-term, with team boss James Vowles working hard on a rebuild aimed at delivering a new race-winning and championship-contending era.

There has certainly been a lot for Sainz to get used to over the last 12 months, from a different factory to a different team mate, and a host of new colleagues to an all-new car, meaning it is no surprise to hear that his 11th campaign in the sport has passed in a blur.

“It’s gone much quicker than I thought it would!” Sainz smiles as he sits down with F1.com at Williams’ hospitality unit in Lusail. “The fact that we are on the run so much in between races, non-stop… The sport is growing massively, so you do more marketing, more travelling, more races... By the end of the year, you cannot understand how it’s all flown by.

“But, if you told me at the beginning of the year that there was going to be fifth position for Williams at the end of the championship, a good step forward, closing the gap to the top teams, and a couple of podiums, I would have taken it. It’s been a good year overall.

“Also, when I signed with Williams in the summer of 2024, if I would have told people that I’m joining them because these results are going to happen, they wouldn’t have fully believed me. I have the results now to back why I chose this team – a vindication.”

Short-term pain for long-term gain

Standout results did not come at the click of a finger, though, with Sainz spending the first few Grands Prix of 2025 adjusting the FW47’s set-up, adapting his driving style and getting used to the outfit’s way of operating – all while new team mate and established Williams driver Alex Albon strung together his strongest start to an F1 season.

“I’m trying so many different things with my set-up and my driving that for sure, you see progress,” he explained at the fifth round of 24 in Saudi Arabia. “Sometimes I try something, but I go backwards, and that then makes me go forwards, because I know which direction I don’t need to go in.

“The same applies to my driving. I try little things with my driving style and the switches in the car, and sometimes I go backwards, but sometimes it helps me go forwards. It’s an adaptation process. I was warned it was going to take time, and it is taking time, but when I get it, I’ll be there.”

Sainz could at least draw on first-hand experience and perspective from several previous team moves – having made his F1 debut back in 2015 and spent almost three seasons at the then-named Toro Rosso (now Racing Bulls), before representing Renault for just over a year, McLaren for two years and then making the switch to Ferrari.

“I’m a driver that, fortunately or unfortunately, has had to change teams quite often,” he underlines, as our conversation continues. “I’ve always been very vocal about how long it takes a driver to adapt to a new team, to extract the last couple of tenths out of the car, and to feel at one with it, but also with your engineers, with the rest of the team.

“I feel like no one really bought that a few years ago when I was saying it. When I went from Toro Rosso to Renault, from Renault to McLaren, everyone was like, ‘Yeah, but you’re F1 drivers, you can do it’. The fact that so many drivers have recently changed teams, and everyone’s realised that it takes time – even the best ones take time to adapt – has kind of proven my point.

“The reality is, with the talent and the speed there is nowadays in F1, when you’re up against Alex Albon in a Williams, Charles Leclerc in a Ferrari, or Max Verstappen in a Red Bull, they know the car by heart, so it’s very difficult to come in and immediately be at that level, as they’re already at the limit.

“In the best case, you can match that and maybe improve it a bit, but in most of the cases when you’re new to a team, you’re going to be a step behind in every Free Practice session, in every Qualifying session, and in every Grand Prix.”

Alongside this on-track push, made more challenging by a frustrating series of incidents and technical issues (Sainz’s mid-season assessment being “everything that could go wrong has gone wrong”), there was a balance to strike with off-track efforts.

“Because you are new to the team, there are all these extra simulator sessions, all these extra visits to the factory that you need to do, but there’s also all the extra marketing you need to do, because all the sponsors want you,” Sainz explains.

“You end up being overloaded with too much simulator, too many factory visits, too many marketing things, so to combine that, plus to deliver on track, the energy levels are not easy to manage, and it takes a bit of time to find a balance.

“To deliver in F1, you need a balance, and during the first six months in a team, there’s very little of that balance. So, you just need to stay patient, you need to trust the process, and you need to know that at some point, everything is going to click.”

Following the leader

One man firmly in Sainz’s corner throughout this period of adaptation was Vowles, who spearheaded Williams’ efforts to secure the Spaniard’s signature in 2024 – fending off competition from the likes of Kick Sauber (prior to their Audi rebranding) and Alpine.

When results were hard to come by on Sainz’s side of the garage, Vowles proclaimed to the media that he was still getting “more than I paid for” – pointing out the value his new driver had been bringing off the track, and insisting it would all come together on the track sooner rather than later.

It is a relationship that appears to have gone from strength to strength, with both parties naturally determined to make progress and move up the grid as quickly as possible, but sharing an openness and transparency that ensures there are no “nasty surprises” along the way.

“After a tough end to 2024, with a lot of crashes, lacking parts, and being slow in Abu Dhabi, James was like, ‘Next year’s car is going to be okay. We’re going to be quick. It’s going to be a good step’,” says Sainz. “The moment we put the new car on track for testing in Bahrain, I realised how much of a big step the team had done.

“But then, as much as he told me those positives, James also said, ‘You’re going to see some very big flaws that we have as a team at the moment’. He was very honest about it, he spoke sense, and he was very realistic.”

Expanding further, Sainz adds: “The thing about Williams is there are so many areas where the team is closer to the top than what I would have expected it to be, but then I also found some other areas that we are very far behind. For me, it’s about being very vocal and very clear about the areas that are not good enough.

“There are very big contrasts in this team. You have incredibly talented people, you have very good ideas, but then there are other things – processes, tools, simulation – where the team is really, really far behind. It’s how we accelerate the process, and everyone’s working flat-out to develop those weaknesses to make sure we are a top team.

“I feel like the good thing is the management, in this case James and [Dorilton Capital], were always super honest to me about them. All of the [weaknesses] have been briefed, I haven’t found any nasty surprises, and I’ve just gone into it being realistic, knowing that the only thing I can do is give my best to try and help.”

Sainz, sealed, delivered

It makes what Williams ultimately achieved in 2025 even more impressive – the squad turning a lowly ninth position in the Teams’ Championship and just 17 points the season before into a high-flying fifth place and a significant return of 137 (their highest yield since 2016).

While it was Albon doing the heavy lifting early in the year, Sainz more than played his part over the second half, returning from the summer break determined to apply the lessons he had learned and to put that aforementioned run of dramas behind him.

At the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, the breakthrough came, with Sainz starring in a tricky, rain-affected Qualifying session to place a brilliant second on the grid behind Verstappen, before converting that into a podium on merit across a dry race.

Mentally prepared not to feature on the rostrum for the foreseeable future following his Ferrari exit, Sainz emotionally erased that thought and gave Williams their first top-three finish since George Russell’s in the rain-shortened 2021 Belgian Grand Prix, and before that Lance Stroll’s at Baku in 2017.

“I think there were two things about Baku that I really enjoyed,” smiles Sainz, who remains Ferrari’s most recent Grand Prix winner. “The first was obviously giving all the mechanics, giving Williams their first podium in many, many years, and probably the first podium for a lot of people who maybe were not there in 2021 with Russell.

“Then, also for me, a bit more validation. It had been a tough first half of the year. I kept saying to the press that I was quick and I just lacked results to prove it, ‘Everything is going to come’, but the results were not coming my way.

“When there was an opportunity for a podium, I grabbed it, and I could say, ‘This is what I came here to do’. I also felt so comfortable racing for a podium again. After six months of being away from the podium, you think, ‘Will I be a bit nervous or a bit rusty?’, but I took the chance and delivered.”

Continuing the momentum

Sainz would deliver again during the Sprint in Austin and the Grand Prix in Qatar, giving Williams some more silverware to take into the winter – a period Vowles has long targeted given the huge regulation changes coming into play from 2026, and the opportunity those bring for all teams to launch themselves into contention in F1’s budget cap era.

With much-needed factory developments in the works, new tools and systems coming online, new hires making their mark across various departments, and a new Mercedes-powered challenger on the way, there is plenty to feel optimistic about at Grove.

So, what is Sainz’s outlook for the next phase of his and Williams’ journey?

“The team is on an upward trajectory, and it’s fundamental to continue that trajectory – it’s important to keep showing progress, to not stall that progress that we are showing,” he comments.

“Having said that, with such a big change of regulations, that progress might look different next year, because it’s going to be so unpredictable to know where everyone’s going to be. But I trust what the team is doing, I trust all the efforts that we’ve been putting into next year’s car through all the simulator sessions and all the development work.

“I’m feeling positive. I’m relatively happy and confident about it, but with the impossibility to say more than, ‘I don’t know where we’re going to be’.”

Thankfully for Sainz and the rest of the F1 paddock, there is not long to wait and find out, with the first pre-season test taking place on his home soil at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya in just over a month’s time…