Sainz brands the start of his Williams career as "extremely frustrating"

On the back of a tough start to his Williams career, four-time Grand Prix winner Carlos Sainz has branded the opening phase of the season as "extremely frustrating" as a set of different issues have not allowed him to extract the "good speed in the car."

Replaced by Lewis Hamilton at Ferrari, Carlos Sainz joined Williams from 2025 onwards on a two-year deal, partnered by Alexander Albon.

Despite an impressive performance during the three-day Bahrain pre-season testing and on the opening day of the season-starting Australian Grand Prix, Sainz endured a difficult first outing with Williams, having crashed out on the first lap of the rain-affected Melbourne race.

In China, Sainz finished seventeenth in the sprint and tenth in the main race after disqualifications for Charles Leclerc, Lewis Hamilton, and Pierre Gasly.

The Madrid-born driver then went on to finish outside of the points at the Japanese Grand Prix. Starting eighth in Bahrain, Sainz engaged himself in close battles with Yuki Tsunoda and Andrea Kimi Antonelli, but he sustained race-ending sidepod damage with the former and received a penalty for forcing the latter off-track.

He returned with a season-best performance at the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, qualifying sixth and finishing eighth. Since then, the Spaniard has repeated his eighth-placed finish in Imola, but he finishes outside the points on two occasions at his home race in Barcelona and most recently in Silverstone.

Asked to summarize the start to his Williams career, Sainz said: "I would say it's been with some highs and lows. Extremely frustrating because I feel like I've had a lot of pace in the car. I've adapted to the team quickly.

"Right from the beginning, I felt with good speed in the car, but it's been very difficult to put two results together through the whole first half of the season. When it was not a reliability issue, it was an incident with a rival.

"And when it's not an incident with another rival, you don't even get to start the race in Austria. Then it was traffic in Q1, or some strategic mistakes we've done through the year.

"So nothing really has come together for us in terms of results. But in the middle of those ups and downs, there's speed. There is proof that we are going in the right direction. It's just when you don't have a result to back it, that's when it gets frustrating.

Pressed on to reveal what has been the hardest thing for him to adapt to as he joined the Grove-based outfit, Sainz highlighted a list of different factors.

"A mix of things. For sure, being back racing in the midfield has its challenges. I think I've been out of Q1 two or three times by ten milliseconds, and you know exactly where those ten milliseconds can be.

"And that changes your whole weekend because you don't have a car to actually make it back through the field, like when you have a very competitive or a top-three, top-four car. If you're out in Q1 or Q2, you can actually still make a difference on race day and make it back through the field.

"In the midfield, everyone has the same race pace as you, and it's extremely difficult to actually recover unless you do something crazy. And then, yeah, just the car obviously feels very different to a Ferrari—very different limitations, very different driving style required, very different setup that I need to find to drive the car.

"But that side of things I've managed to adapt pretty quickly. And maybe putting a bit of emphasis on how much lap time and results come from actually understanding yourself with your engineers, with your team, with all the strategy calls—how you communicate during the race, how do you come to the point of making the right call.

"That needs a bit of bedding time to actually execute a good race weekend, both in quali and the race," concluded Sainz.