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Carlos Sainz has admitted that the disappointing start Williams made to the 2026 Formula 1 season did make him doubt the project for the first time.
Sainz has scored points three times in five weekends at the start of this season – a trio of ninth-place finishes in China, Miami and Canada – but Williams‘s performance at the start of the new rules era has been a far cry from the level it was at in his first season with the team in 2025.
The FW48 has been the ninth-fastest car on average so far this season heading into this weekend’s Monaco Grand Prix and adrift of fellow Mercedes customer team Alpine, which sits fifth in the constructors’ championship (where Williams finished in 2025) and has been the clear benchmark among the F1 midfield.
Asked by The Race whether this year’s car – which missed the first pre-season shakedown test and is still significantly overweight – could ever reach the theoretical performance level Williams thought it might have, Sainz said: “I think we acknowledge that fundamentally, even without the weight issue, this car is not good enough for what it could have been or should have been.”
Sainz added that “speaking very bluntly this year, we’ve underdelivered in many, many areas” – not just on weight but also the “performance delivery of the car” – and said he would realistically be happy if by the end of the season Williams manages to get to the front of the midfield.
He has repeatedly made reference to Williams’s reality being a “bump” and did so again here, which prompted a follow-up question on whether his belief in the “Williams project” had been tested.
“Tested my faith? For sure,” he replied. “When you go from scoring podiums at the end of last year to suddenly being where we were two seconds and a half of the pace at the beginning of the year, two seconds is a big test of faith or a big shock to the system.
“And I was the first one to say to James [team principal James Vowles] and to the management that it was not expected.”
Sainz did turn this into a positive – he was jokingly prodded by Williams’s press officer to make him aware that Vowles was in the vicinity – saying it had led to a “very thorough analysis with some very important members of the team”.
“And I think once we all understood where it had started to go wrong and how, I very quickly realised that it might have actually done good things for the team, this bump,” he continued.
“If we wouldn’t have hit this bump, I think there might have been things in the team that we would have never changed, that thanks to the shock of that bump, we definitely – James and his team – put a very strong action to correct them, to erase them from the system, to for sure try and not [have them] happen again.
“That made me recover a lot that faith and the belief in the project.”
Sainz conceded that Williams overdelivered with a 2025 car that enabled him to score two grand prix podiums and said that had “maybe also raised my expectations for 2026”.
But he stressed Williams’s main issue, of weight, was “going to take a bit too long for my liking” to be resolved, even with the constraints of F1’s cost cap meaning the team needs to have “the right order of priorities, to know what also adds other performance to the car”.
“I need to be patient,” he said. “I know we’ve hit a pretty big bump at the beginning of this year, and we are just trying to get out of it.
“So patience, doing the right steps at the right times, in the meantime I focus on my performance, which has been pretty good this year, and that’s it.”
