Carlos Sainz and Alex Albon have suffered a blow ahead of his first season at Williams, with team principal James Vowles admitting 2024 crash damage has compromised the team’s F1 2025 program.

Sainz is gearing up for his first season as a Williams driver alongside Albon, having been forced to make way at Ferrari for seven-time World Champion Lewis Hamilton at the end of last year.

Carlos Sainz braced for ‘difficult’ F1 2025 as Williams face ‘distraction’

The Spaniard was informed a year ago that his Ferrari contract would not be extended beyond 2024 and went on to produce the most complete season of his F1 career, taking assured wins in Australia and Mexico.

Sainz signed a multi-year contract with Williams 24 hours after last year’s Belgian Grand Prix, with the team making promising gains since former Mercedes strategist Vowles was appointed team boss at the start of 2023.

After finishing a fine seventh in Vowles’ first season in charge, Williams slumped to a disappointing ninth in 2024.

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The team were forced to field only one car in Australia due to the absence of a spare chassis, with Logan Sargeant controversially withdrawn after team-mate Alex Albon crashed in practice.

Albon and Sargeant’s replacement, Franco Colapinto, were involved in a number of costly accidents in the closing weeks of the season as Williams fell further behind the likes of Haas and VCARB in the standings.

Williams are currently scheduled to be the first team to unveil their F1 2025 car with the new FW47 due to be launched on February 14, four days before F1’s first-ever collective season-launch event in London.

And Vowles has admitted that the team’s 2025 program has been hurt by the late-2024 accidents of Colapinto and Albon last year, with Williams forced to reallocate a six-figure sum from their 2025 budget to fund repairs at the end of last season.

Asked if the end of 2024 proved tough for Williams, Vowles told media including PlanetF1.com: “There’s no doubt about it. I think teams aren’t built to take six major crashes.

“Generally speaking, we’ll hold a stock of parts that’s about four, maybe five of each component. That’s about where you want to be.

“And so it doesn’t take long to figure out that once you crash five or six of them, you’re in trouble.

“Huge effort by both the trackside team and those in the factory. I’ve had people that are part-time or even on shift work just asking what more can they do to come in and do it.

“And that’s an incredible feeling when you’re part of an organisation that goes above and beyond to make sure we have two racing cars on the grid every week.

“It’s a distraction away from ‘25, there’s no doubt about it.

“Not so much from ‘26, but you have to pull your effort into just making sure you’re here on track fighting with your competitors around you.

“You’re effectively just moving elements around from what you can do.

“No one here would have accounted, I hope anyway, for this amount of attrition [so] late on in the season.

“The implication is you have to take a little bit away from [the 2025] cost cap [budget]. That’s the frustration behind it. You’re moving things around.

“What’s the implication? We have elements that we’re fixing for the long term, which is around process structure, infrastructure.

“It doesn’t hinder any of those. And those are the big gains.

“What we’re talking about is a few hundreds of thousands that I wish we weren’t spending [in 2024] that we could spend [in 2025].”

Vowles’ comments come after Sainz’s father, the rallying great Carlos Sainz Sr, admitted that his son is expecting a “difficult” season in 2025.

Appearing on the El Cafelito podcast, Mr Sainz said: “It will be a difficult year at Williams.

“They finished second to last in the championship, but he is full of enthusiasm and is very eager to get started.”

Sainz made his first on-track appearance for Williams in last month’s post-season test in Abu Dhabi, setting the second-fastest time behind former Ferrari team-mate Charles Leclerc.

Speaking earlier this month, the 30-year-old revealed that he was “very impressed” by his new team with a “solid plan” in place ahead of the season-opening Australian Grand Prix on March 16.

He said: “It’s an important time for the team and we are all going to push to bring Williams back to the front of the grid as soon as possible.

“I was very impressed with the team back in Abu Dhabi. After a long year, it was great to watch the motivation and effort that everyone put in at such an important test.

“Thanks to that, we’ve been able to put together a solid plan and we have already started working on it to make sure we are as prepared as possible ahead of the pre-season test and first race.”

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