Sainz says struggling Williams must go ‘back to the drawing board’ after Barcelona

Carlos Sainz believes "it's time to go back to the drawing board" for Williams after a difficult weekend in the Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix.

Following three solid weekends in Miami, Canada and Monaco where Williams scored points, the team knew that last weekend's visit to Spain would be a much tougher test.

Despite recent upgrades, the FW48 still lacks downforce relative to rivals, and the penalty for carrying excess weight – something that is taking time to address – is particularly high at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya with its high-speed corners.

The reality proved to be even more difficult than anticipated, though, with home hero Sainz and team mate Alex Albon failing to reach the points.

Sainz had to settle for P16 on the grid and although he gained a couple of places with a good first lap in Sunday's race, as well as there being a high attrition rate, he was still only P12 at the flag having been lapped twice.

“I think realistically speaking, we expected it to be hard,” he said. “Looking back at it, I think it's been a bit more of a shock of how far we are in medium and high-speed corners [behind], partly due to weight, but even more important, the downforce that we have in the car.

“So I think it's been a massive, I wouldn't call it shock, not even a wake-up call, because we knew it, but a realisation that we are very far from where we should be, where we targeted to be, or where we want to be.

“So I think it's time to go back to the drawing board and start bringing more things to the car, because clearly in a medium speed track we are very far [behind].”

It was an even harder weekend for Albon, who qualified a frustrated P18 and his race was compromised by a loose camera mounting.

After a long stop he returned to the track for what became a test session and was not officially classified, having crossed the line 11 laps down.

Williams has upgrades working their way through the system, including some focused on weight-saving, but Team Principal James Vowles has previously made it clear that this will take time.

However, Sainz has called for a greater effort from the team and is fully aware that closing the gap over the remainder of the season is an almost impossible challenge.

“I know what's coming and for sure what's coming normally, in this team, upgrades really tend to work," said Sainz.

"But at the same time, I'm not sure if it's enough to cut the gap that we have in this sort of track. So I think we need to do more than what we are doing already.

“Every week for the team, it's super important to find points of downforce or kilos of weight, because even though I realise that the team is pushing flat-out back at home, and we are all pushing with everything we have, we probably need even more. So we need to focus a lot.

“We need to realise that Barcelona is a very good track to measure a car's performance, and this weekend we were anything between 1.6 and 1.9 seconds from the leaders, and almost six or seven tenths from the first midfield car. So that's our target.”