Carlos Sainz says he was left feeling “stupid” after an apparent miscommunication between the Williams pit wall and its drivers

After starting from sixth on the grid, Sainz wound up in ninth at the chequered flag while Alex Albon raced to fifth from his seventh-place grid slot to bounce back after a penalty took away his Sprint race points finish.

Carlos Sainz: I thought I wasn’t going to be attacked

The Miami Grand Prix was dominated by Ferrari’s intra-team discussions as Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton swapped places back and forth, but there was also some mild unhappiness at Williams after an attempt at a team instruction was miscommunicated to its drivers.

At the start of the race, due to Lando Norris’ off-track incident, Sainz and Albon had made contact through Turn 3 and this resulted in some damage to Sainz’s floor.

Compromising the balance of the Williams, Sainz’s first stint also wasn’t helped by the fact he was on a set of used medium tyres while Albon had the benefit of a fresh set.

As the stint unfolded with Sainz ahead of Albon, the Spaniard appeared to be under the impression that Albon wouldn’t attack him, radioing in to say “Yeah, let’s go forward, guys. We’re compromising the race here. Let’s get back to our rhythm.”

Saying that “I could do with a bit of help from Alex”, hinting that he was spending more time looking in his mirrors at his teammate than he’d like, Sainz was told “Alex has got the call”, suggesting that the intent to hold station and push on together had been made clear.

Sainz was thus surprised when Albon passed him to take sixth place, with the Spaniard being told to “stay within DRS” and “let’s be the bigger one”.

The timing of the instruction to Albon to hold firm was made almost exactly at the point where Albon had already begun his overtake on Sainz, as he explained after the chequered flag.

“It was most probably in the exact moment of that message when I overtook him,” Albon said.

“I think, if we stayed together a little bit longer, then I would’ve been told that [to hold position] – but, for that time, we were still free to race. I think it was just a delay between the two cars.”

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The radio transcript shows that Albon was told by his race engineer that, due to managing a water pressure issue, he had to maintain a gap of at least a second to the car ahead [Sainz].

However, with Albon having already begun his overtake, he was told to get on with it after ending up ahead of Sainz.

With Albon ending up in fifth at the chequered flag, Sainz came home in ninth and sounded frustrated over team radio as he said “That’s not how I go racing, guys.”

Team boss James Vowles jumped on the radio to acknowledge Sainz’s frustrations and said “I agree with you, we need proper engagement on it”, but Sainz had clearly been informed about the miscommunication by the time he addressed the media.

“The team told us that we were going to freeze positions, then… I don’t know if he got the message or not but, basically, he overtook me back,” he said, having got ahead of Albon in the first place due to an error from the British-Thai driver.

Having held back to give Albon DRS to use as defence in Saudi Arabia two weeks prior, Sainz said he’d been left feeling a bit stupid by how things had played out in Miami.

“No, for me, it’s only if I’m told on the radio that I’m not going to be attacked and we’re going to push together, to be overtaken as a driver you feel stupid because you feel powerless, you’re playing the good guy,” he said.

“The same way that I played the good guy in Jeddah – and you get overtaken, and you look completely stupid.

“But it’s the way it goes, we’ll talk about it, I’m sure we’ll come out of it better as a team and we will move on.”

With the miscommunication having been cleared up as being down to happenstance rather than malice, Albon felt the results that played out were indicative of the strength of his performance in Miami.

“We had a really strong pace on my side of the garage. I think I struggled a little bit in the first couple of laps. I thought I had damage from the Turn 3 incident, so I took it easy, and I had some snaps,” he said.

“I think it was just offsetting my focus a little bit. But, once I got to the rhythm of the race, we were really quick. If you look at the race pace, we proved that we were strong.”

Having taken fifth and delivered upon the potential that Williams had shown all weekend having been consistently in the upper midfield, Albon said, “I think this weekend has surprised us, for sure. We’ve been speaking about it in every debrief so far this weekend, why are we good this weekend?

“It’s not a question mark, but what is it about this track that really suits us and then I think what we understand is, for the most part generally, it doesn’t have corners that we don’t like, let’s say it like that.

“From the first lap of FP1, the car was in a good place, and we could build very quickly which, in a Sprint race weekend, is very important.”

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