Carlos Sainz will bring a lot of experience of what it takes to become a winning team again in Formula 1 to Williams.
Williams has not won a race since the 2012 Spanish Grand Prix, when Columbian driver Pastor Maldonado took an unlikely victory in a year when there were seven different winners from six different teams.
Since then they have been on a decline, having briefly shown signs of competitiveness at the beginning of the hybrid era before trailing off between the 2017 and 2022 seasons.
After taking over as team principal in 2023, James Volwes has been a key figurehead in turning around their fortunes and recapturing their glory years.
Vowles spent months convincing Carlos Sainz to join the team, after the Spaniard was told 2024 would be his final year at Ferrari under his current contract. Now he has joined the team, Sainz has been working hard on their 2025 challenger with teammate Alex Albon.
Discussing what it has been like working with him over the last few weeks on F1 TV, Sainz said Albon has been picking up on subtle differences.
Carlos Sainz outlines ‘little differences’ Alex Albon has picked up on while at Williams
The partnership between Albon and Sainz is set to be one of the storylines of 2025, as it pits both former Red Bull drivers against each other in a team that is desperate for points.
Sainz will be hopeful that their car for 2025 enables more points finishes after they slipped back to ninth in the Constructors’ Championship. Working with Albon already, Sainz has noticed that he picks up on subtle differences in his driving style to help him learn.
“In the Barcelona test we could always see little differences in driving style, I was picking up on his and he was picking up on mine, and we were chatting ‘Why do you do this like that?’,” said Sainz.
“So you can pick up on those things, but the important stuff in terms of the direction we want the car to go, we both know what we want.”
Carlos Sainz outlines biggest change he faces at Williams
Sainz will make his race debut with Williams at Albert Park in March, the same track that he came back from and won after suffering from appendicitis and having to miss one race for Ferrari.
It will be a challenging season for Sainz to adapt from being in a car that was readily capable of winning races to a car that will now be struggling to make it through to Q3.
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Sainz has said that his biggest challenge so far has been getting used to the Mercedes power unit and Williams steering wheel, having driven it for the first time in his F1 career.
The Spaniard has already made one request to Williams to change their steering wheel design to improve his starts, with pre-season testing set to be an important few days for him to get comfortable in their 2025 challenger.
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