Carlos Sainz says people “don’t understand” Formula 1 very well if they expected him to be on the pace at Williams from the start of the F1 2025 season.

And he has revealed that he knew he was “nowhere near” the required level as early as pre-season testing in Bahrain.

Carlos Sainz defends slow start to F1 2025 season with Williams

Additional reporting by Thomas Maher

The signing of Sainz was hailed as a major coup for Williams when the former Ferrari driver arrived at Grove at the end of last season, having been forced to make way for seven-time World Champion Lewis Hamilton at his previous team.

Sainz got an early taste of Williams machinery at the 2024 post-season test in Abu Dhabi before impressing in Bahrain testing in February, setting the fastest time of all on the second day of winter running in Sakhir.

However, Sainz’s quality has yet to translate into results with the Spaniard scoring points just twice across the opening five races of the new season.

Carlos Sainz vs Alex Albon: Williams head-to-head scores for F1 2025

👉 F1 2025: Head-to-head qualifying statistics between team-mates

👉 F1 2025: Head-to-head race statistics between team-mates

Sainz produced his best performance yet for Williams at last weekend’s Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, where he outqualified Hamilton – who has also struggled since his high-profile winter switch – to secure sixth on the grid before leading team-mate Alex Albon home to an eighth-place finish.

Speaking to media including PlanetF1.com at the recent Bahrain Grand Prix, Sainz argued that it was unrealistic to expect him to be at one with the Williams at the start of the season.

He said: “If you expect to see the best of Carlos Sainz in a Williams in the third race and in a new car, then you don’t understand the sport very well.

“Or at least how long it might take for a driver to actually get fully up to speed with the car and to fully understand where the last tenth and a half or last two tenths of each car lies.

“The speed has been there – in Australia and Suzuka. In China, I had a bit of an off weekend through many different reasons.

“But to be honest, in Australia and Suzuka I think I was pretty quick, especially given that I’m still new to the car.

“To manage to be close or in the same tenth as Alex all the way through quali, I think it’s a good start to the season.

“I just need to make sure now we start doing less mistakes when it comes to executing the weekend and keep improving my speed because obviously I believe the speed still we can improve it a little bit.

“But we are not as far as it seems. I feel like we just need to put a full weekend together and it will come.”

Sainz went on to remark that he felt “very comfortable” with the car during pre-season testing in Bahrain, yet still felt he was “nowhere near” where he needed to be.

And he revealed that he has been pushing Williams to help him recapture the setup he had in testing, where he felt most at ease in his new machinery.

He said: “In testing I felt very comfortable with the car.

“Actually, it’s a balance and a car that I’ve been looking forward to targeting in the recent races.

“Given I was not as happy in China, I looked back at the test to a setup that we were running and I was keen together with the team to try and put the car somewhere closer to the way it felt in the Bahrain test, because there I felt like I was up to speed and driving fairly naturally and I didn’t have to think so much while driving.

“While in China, I remember, and even at Suzuka, I’ve been having to really break my head to understand how to drive the car and to extract all the performance from it.

“You first need to go through these weekends where you have a bit more of a challenging time to understand that and reverse engineer that.

“That takes time. It’s 24 races. We’ve only done three and obviously everyone expected me to be straight up in the pace, which is a good thing.

“It means people value me and expect high things of me.

“But I was the first one that after Bahrain test when I was P1, I was like: ‘I’m nowhere near where I need to be still with this car to perform at the level that I want to perform.’

“So I was the first one coming down expectations and knowing that the first quarter of the year was going to be tough.

“Especially with a guy like Alex pushing hard and doing such a good job, obviously, it always takes a bit of time to get to that level.

“So I’m calm. I’m just down to my work doing my things and it will come.

More on Carlos Sainz and Williams from PlanetF1.com

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“Sometimes you jump into a Formula 1 car and you’re just naturally quick. Whatever you do to the car, the lap time comes easy.

“And I felt that was the case in Abu Dhabi test last year and in Bahrain test this year. I didn’t need to think while driving and I felt like as soon as I jumped in the car was quick – actually quicker even than what I thought I would be.

“I was surprisingly quick in my own expectations. And then we went into Australia, the balance changed a bit.

“The tarmac changes quite a bit from Bahrain to Australia, China and Japan with all these resurfaces that have been done and the car just feels completely different.

“The through-corner balance is different and you’re just a bit stuck on, ‘What do I do now to my driving?’, or ‘What do I do now to the car?’ to go that one more tenth quicker.

“As I said, I was not far, I was within a tenth.

“That’s where you start digging into the data and you start working with your engineers. But you need to go through this whole loop, whole process, to actually get to conclusions and understandings, and that takes time and experience and some races.

“But as I said, I’m calm, I’m happy, and we’re getting there.”

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