'Concerning and frustrating' Carlos Sainz judges Williams' 'bad trend' evidenced at Silverstone

Carlos Sainz has conceded to being 'concerned and frustrated' by the trend emerging as Williams brings upgrades to Formula 1 weekends, but fails to find the gains enjoyed by rivals across the grid.

With the new-for-2026 regulations still in their infancy, significant upgrade packages are seeing teams gain up to six-tenths per lap in performance - this figure believed to be in the ballpark of what Ferrari achieved with its package in Barcelona.

While smaller upgrades naturally bring a more modest improvement, Sainz was left scratching his head at Silverstone, after Williams appeared to make no progress despite running a new front wing. While a "b-spec" car is expected to debut in Baku after the summer break, Sainz is not convinced that it will yeild the benefits that are hoped for. 

"We did a really good start and had a very good lap one through good car positioning, and I was up to the points and I thought that from there the race was on because the cars that I had behind, maybe with the dirty air giving them, I could hold them off for the rest of the race," he told media, including Crash.net.

"But as soon as we settled into our pace, we saw the Alpine and the Audis were just simply too quick for us, which has been the case all weekend, and we couldn't hold them off. 

"[It's] concerning, frustrating because it starts to be a bad trend this year that we don't seem to really find a lot of lap time when the upgrades are coming. We need to have a good sit-down now this week and analyse what's happening because, unfortunately, we've shed a lot of weight out of the car by now, but the gap to the front keeps increasing and the gap to the leader of the midfield keeps increasing, so we don't seem to be finding the lap time that we expected in the wind tunnel."

Despite Sainz's comments, the British Grand Prix weekend saw both Williams escape the first phase of qualifying for the first time since Monaco, with the Spaniard qualifying in 15th place, and team-mate Alex Albon in 16th place on both occasions.

But with his frustrations centring on being unable to fight during a race, Sainz did not hold back when he was asked how it feels watching cars pass, knowing there is nothing he can do to stop the slide. 

"Obviously, I'm not happy," he said. "I'm very obviously upset. 

"You'll see me now a bit upset - worried, maybe, is the right word. No one likes getting overtaken, especially after so many good starts that we're doing this year and getting ourselves in the points multiple times and then dropping back. 

"It's been a pattern this season. I'm here to always try and win, to always try and do the best I can, and today was a frustrating day, so you will not see me very cheerful.

"But tomorrow when I wake up and I go to the factory in the morning, I will be smiling again and trying to put all my energy to try and improve the situation and try and help the team to find the problems that we're having, because it's clear to me now that we're having serious issues when developing this car and we are not bringing the performance that we thought we were."