Sainz hopes Williams' current approach "will pay off next year"
On the back of an up-and-down season so far in 2025, Williams driver Carlos Sainz has revealed that the British outfit is doing “a massive push on next year’s car.”
Williams enjoyed a competitive form at the beginning of the season, with Alexander Albon and his new team-mate Carlos Sainz displaying great speed across a variety of track early on.
The Thai driver finished fifth at the season-opening Australian Grand Prix before adding further points to his tally in six of the following seven races. However, the London-born drivers suffered retirement in the next three rounds – Barcelona, Montreal and Spielberg -, and finished only in P15 last time out at the Hungaroring.
Despite his encouraging form early on in the season, Sainz struggled to convert his pace into impressive results, finishing in the points-paying position only on six occasions in the first fourteen races of the season.
With Williams having indicated that they would not bring major upgrades for the remainder of the season, Sainz has revealed that the British outfit is doing “a massive push on next year’s car.”
"I think there’s no secret in Formula 1. If you do such a big commitment from the team to realise that you’re not going to bring many upgrades to a Formula 1 season, you need to expect that sooner or later you will start falling back—because this is exactly how Formula 1 works.
"And even the midfield teams—they never sleep. Everyone is bringing, every three or four races, a bit of a package, a bit of an upgrade. At Williams, yeah, we brought a couple of things at the beginning of the year with the updates of the front wing regulations. But realistically, we haven’t brought anything up until now.
"So no secrets—we expected that. We still believe it’s the right call, and we still trust the process. We still trust that will pay off next year. We are doing a massive push on next year’s car. I’ve had already a few simulator sessions with it. In debriefs, we almost talk more about next year than we talk about this year—even if we are racing this year."
Despite his frustrating start to his Williams career, Sainz displayed encouraging speed on several occasions, but stars did not always want to align for him. In Miami and Imola, the four-time Grand Prix winner found himself at the sharp end of the field and looked on course to pick up a good haul of points, but a poorly timed safety car saw him lose several valuable positions.
"I guess the most frustrating part is that when we had a very competitive car in races like Miami and Imola—that’s when we had the chance, maybe with both cars, to score top fives.
"I was in the top five all the way through those races until something out of my control happened. And that’s where we’re missing 20, 30 points that could give us that extra bit of space in the championship.
"But that’s how the year has decided to go. Now that we have maybe a less competitive car, we need to get those small points. Maybe we’re not going to fight for P5s, P4s like we did at the time, but we can still get top 10s, top 8s that will help in our championship," Sainz concluded.
