EXCLUSIVE: What Carlos Sainz still needs to learn in ‘hard’ Williams adaptation

After five years at Ferrari, Carlos Sainz is having to adjust to a new F1 car, team and driving style at Williams.

Sainz joined Williams for the 2025 season after being forced to vacate his Ferrari seat to seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton despite performing admirably alongside Charles Leclerc.

The 30-year-old Spaniard has also had to switch his mindset, having gone from a team capable of contesting for regular pole positions, victories and podiums to one that has spent the vast majority of the 2020s struggling to get out of Q1 and scrapping for the odd point.

Alongside Alex Albon, Sainz, a four-time grand prix winner, forms Williams’ strongest driver pairing for years, and the match up promises to be one of the most closely monitored and intriguing battles of the year.

Unsurprisingly, it is Albon who boasts the early upper hand as Sainz settles into his new team, scoring 42 points to Sainz’s 12 and beating the Spaniard 7-1 in grands prix. The qualifying battle has been much closer, with Sainz and Albon locked at 4-4 in regular grand prix sessions, and Albon 2-0 up in the sprint.

Sainz has made an incredibly respectable start to life at Williams and from the outside, it appears that his transition into the team couldn’t have gone much smoother. But that doesn’t quite tell the full picture.

“Don’t underestimate how hard it was for me, the first three races. The adaptation process with a new team, how hard it’s been,” Sainz exclusively told Crash.net at the Monaco Grand Prix.

“Even now that I’m at a pretty good level with the performance of the car and the speed, even though I still think I have more to come, don’t underestimate how tough it has been also understanding with my engineer, with the strategy team, to bond and to start working really, really well.

“I think it’s cost us points still, a lot of points, through not having that experience with the team. But one thing that leaves me confident is the speed. The speed is there.

“When you are quick on Saturday, when you are quick on Sunday, you know the other things will just come as soon as I get an input to improve them and we start understanding each other better, the other things will come.

“So as long as the speed is there, I’m happy.”

What has been the biggest challenge?

Sainz has had to make tweaks to the way he drives after being “caught by surprise” by specific characteristics of Williams’ FW47. He has had to relearn parts of his driving style to adapt, and he acknowledges this process has slowed him down.

As part of the same exclusive interview with Crash.net, Sainz referred to "muscle memory" of previous cars when speaking about Hamilton's struggles adapting to Ferrari's 2025 challenger after 12 years with Mercedes. 

The switch from a Ferrari power unit to Mercedes engine, for example, has been among the biggest hurdles to overcome. It is the first time in his career that Sainz has used Mercedes power.

And Sainz is still on the path to making incremental improvements. 

“There’s things in the car that I felt in China and Australia that caught me by surprise,” Sainz explained.

“I was very quick in the Abu Dhabi test with last year’s car, I was very quick in the Bahrain test, and in Melbourne until quali. And China being a sprint weekend I discovered things about the car in quali that I didn’t know were there because I didn’t experience them in testing.

“I thought I was honestly going to be putting better laps together than I did, and after I discovered this I got to work with my engineers to try to find ways to drive around them, try to change the car set-up to avoid that.

“After doing that, the last few races have been to the level that I think honestly, is better than expected.”

A quarter of the 2025 F1 season may already be complete, but the task to feel fully at one with his Williams is an ongoing journey for Sainz. 

“I’m pretty sure there’s still things to discover that will hold me back some weekends, but hopefully it’s isolated weekends where I discover one thing and I haven’t adapted to one thing.”

Sainz pinpointed race execution and communication with his team as being the main areas to address and where he feels the biggest gains can be made.

“I think that’s where we need to raise the level a bit and I think that’s never been my problem,” he added.

“I think I always tend to read races well, it’s just the way I communicate to the team, the way the team understands what I’m communicating and what I get back from the team, so we do the right decision making and the right process.

“I think that hasn't been going exactly the best way recently, but I’m confident that we can get it to work well.”

Carlos Sainz feeling ‘completely at home’ at Williams

The other big aspect of Sainz’s adaptation comes outside of the cockpit.

Since first visiting Williams’ F1 factory in Grove on 15 January, Sainz has been working hard to embed himself within the team and to familiarise himself with a new place of work, colleagues and culture at the British squad.

Four months later and Sainz says he feels “completely at home”, though he believes it will take him years to fully bond with some members of the team he has not spent enough time with.

“There’s still members of the team and people I would like to spend a bit more time with to understand better things inside the team, and this I will need for sure years to keep bonding and to keep understanding people better,” he said.

“And what they are trying to do and what we are trying to achieve in different areas. But I think I can be quite happy with where I am right now.”

With openings at a front-running team looking increasingly unlikely, Sainz spent several months considering his options for 2025 and beyond. These fundamentally boiled down to Williams, Sauber/Audi and Alpine.

Despite Sainz’s father, a two-time World Rally Champion, wanting his son to seriously consider Audi’s offer, he ultimately picked Williams because he had faith in the project and vision that was sold to him ahead of a major rules shake-up coming to F1 in 2026.

There may still be a long way to go, but considering the team’s strong start to 2025 and upward trajectory, Sainz betting on Williams is already looking like a smart decision.

“Certainly I signed with Williams because I saw the potential to be back at the level that I was at with Ferrari, or any of the top teams. If not, I would have never have signed with Williams,” Sainz said.

“I saw that potential, that vision, that project and I certainly believed that team could do it. If not, I would not have signed. 

"I’m not going to lie, the rise in performance has come earlier and more quick than expected. With the last couple of races especially, I think we were performing at a very high level. 

"Unfortunately, the results haven’t come very nicely on our side of the garage, even though we’ve been extremely quick on Saturdays and Sundays, the results haven’t been backing that nice feeling.

“That’s something we are working on and it will come. We are making mistakes and it’s a year to do mistakes.”