Carlos Sainz has opened up on Williams’ difficult 2026 season, revealing the precise moment he understood the team’s problems ran far deeper than initially expected.
The former Ferrari driver joined Williams ahead of the 2026 campaign with high hopes, but the British outfit endured a torrid start before pre-season testing had even begun.
Williams infamously missed their pre-season shakedown in Barcelona because their cars simply were not ready in time, marking an alarming start to the new regulations era.
Despite that, Sainz admitted he was not overly concerned at the time, believing the team could recover ground through upgrades as the season progressed.
He pointed to Williams’ recovery trajectory from the previous season as the basis for his early optimism, expecting a similar pattern of improvement to unfold in 2026.
Sainz explained: “The full picture didn’t become clear immediately, because at the beginning of the season I thought the problems were mainly related to the accumulated delays in completing the project and the weight of the car.”
He added: “I told myself: we’ll start slower, but we’ll make up ground with the upgrades, just like we did in 2025.”
The team collected five points finishes across the opening six races of the season, but then failed to score in any of the following six rounds, a sharp decline that began to raise serious concerns.
It was the development battle that ultimately served as the clearest warning sign for Sainz, as rival teams began pulling away despite Williams introducing updates of their own.
Sainz told the Spanish edition of Motorsport.com: “When you see that our progress is much smaller than that of VCARB, McLaren, and many of the other teams, it’s not a good sign, because we started from a less competitive base.”
He continued by explaining that a team starting from a lower base should theoretically recover more ground than those already performing at a higher level, making Williams’ lack of progress all the more troubling.
“It was then that I realised, along with the team, that we were clearly not on the right track and that we had to reconsider everything,” the Spaniard stated bluntly.
Sainz identified three separate and compounding problems that combined to create the team’s dire 2026 performance, rather than a single isolated issue holding them back.
He outlined those issues clearly, saying: “The problems were not only related to the initial delay or the weight, but also to a project that was not aerodynamically competitive enough.”
Sainz summarised the situation directly: “The current performance is a consequence of three different problems: not finishing the car on time, not building it within the minimum weight, and not achieving sufficiently competitive aerodynamics.”
The situation paints a stark picture for Williams, who had shown signs of a genuine upward trajectory before the new technical regulations arrived and exposed fundamental weaknesses in their design philosophy.