INTERVIEW: Williams form a “bump in the road” as Carlos Sainz commits his future

There were many facets to Sainz's debut campaign with the team: a steady enough start, scoring points in six of the first ten Grands Prix of 2025, but this was followed by a miserable six-race run either side of the summer break that was sparked by him failing to start in the Austrian Grand Prix due to the brakes on his car catching fire before the start of the race.

And then there was the remarkable conclusion as he scored third-place finishes in the Azerbaijan and Qatar Grands Prix, ending the team's four-year podium drought stretching back to George Russell's second place in the rain-soaked 2021 Belgian Grand Prix.

If you consider that a dubious result given the circumstances that surrounded the race at Spa-Francorchamps (it was called off after lengthy rain-hit delays and just three laps behind the safety car), then you have to go back to the 2017 Azerbaijan Grand Prix for Williams' previous top three finish on merit courtesy of Lance Stroll.

For so long through 2025 it appeared as if Alex Albon would be the driver to end the team's podium drought. He had comfortably outscored his team-mate up until the race in Baku, notably finishing fifth in Melbourne, Miami, Imola and Zandvoort.

Yet it was Sainz who grabbed the headlines, not once, but twice, given his repeat of the feat in the penultimate race of the campaign at the Lusail International Circuit.

Regardless of the circumstances between the two drivers, Williams finished a sensational fifth in the Constructors' Championship, its best performance for eight years. At that stage it appeared as if the foundations had been laid.

Unfortunately for Williams, after finally getting to grips with its car in the ground-effect era, the regulations changed over the winter, and rather than taking a hoped-for step forward, Williams has regressed.

By Vowles' own admission, it delivered a car that was late, overweight and lacking in performance. It has attempted to make amends ever since.

But results have been wretched. Following a smattering of points over the first few races, neither Sainz nor Albon has finished in the top ten in the last eight races heading back to, of all places, Baku this weekend.

The team is languishing in ninth in the Constructors' standings. At this stage, the best it can hope for is seventh as it battles with Haas and Audi for the minor placings.

Despite the difficulties encountered, something remarkable happened over the summer break as Albon and Sainz recommitted their futures to Williams by signing new deals.

There is an understanding from both drivers that under Vowles, whilst the team perhaps over-performed in 2025, the project he created and has since fostered since his arrival from Mercedes three and a half years ago was always long-term. There was no quick fix.

Yet, the team gave itself a glimpse of what could be last season, and now it has become a question of how soon it can return to such a position.

"It's a bump in the road," said Sainz, speaking to this writer. "It's not a small bump. It's been a big bump, probably a bigger bump than anyone expected inside the team, and it's been tough.”

"It's been a very, very tough two-thirds of the year, honestly, battling for positions that we would have never expected to be battling for after the end of last year."

"My only ask of all the team, all of us together, is for a quick turnaround because, obviously, we cannot afford to spend a very long time in this project now, going back to battling for positions where we were three or four years ago.

"We need to show a quick reaction. We need to show resilience to the situation, and a quick reaction to prove that it is just a bump in the road, and that these things can happen in a long-term project like we are on.

"So a quick, swift reaction, to get back on it from the beginning of next year, should be the target for all of us."

Again, it would appear that Vowles was convincing in proving to Sainz and Albon that what has occurred this season has been this 'big bump in the road', one the team probably will not recover from this year.

Instead, it is all eyes on 2027. "What we demonstrated to Carlos is that, after everything that happened this winter, everything that we are doing right now to fix it, the corner that we've turned as a result of it, and what the future looks like.

"There's zero doubt about it. We're way off where we want to be as a result of it. We have a car that was overweight, late and not to the performance specification that we wanted it to be. Those are just facts.

"What Carlos wanted to see, and Alex, for that matter, as well, is that the changes that we are doing show us that that's the right trajectory to go through.

"It's been a really difficult season. Whatever happens, we're turning up at tracks and just not where we want to be, and not even able to score points now."

“But what Carlos can see, and Alex especially, because he's been here since '22, is you just wind back six months, 12 months, and then you wind forward to what we're doing over the next six, and it's a combination of people, process, system, structures.

"It's not one thing, and it shows them that we are on the right path. There are just elements of this year that the pain we caused ourselves over the winter has had an impact, probably all the way across '26, to be completely frank."

It is why Sainz and Albon opted to put pen to paper again, with the Spanish driver signing a multi-year agreement. The understanding is that runs through to the end of 2028.

Therefore, Sainz is convinced the "quick reaction" he mentioned is undoubtedly possible, and that Vowles and his team, via his "people, process, system, structures" mantra, will ultimately deliver again, and hopefully as early as next year.

"I wouldn't have signed if I didn't believe in the fact that we can turn it around and that the team has the capacity to turn it around," said Sainz.

"For sure, this bump on the road has opened our eyes to realising that we are not at the level that we thought we would be in multiple aspects of our team performance, but that's only going to create, I think, a positive effect in the future."

"Imagine this year we'd produced a car that is P5 in the Constructors', and one second away from the leaders. It would have almost been a fake realisation that we are not so far from the leaders.

"But the fact that the bump has been so big has actually triggered a lot of bigger changes and a lot of eye-opening things.

"OK, even if we had some podiums last year, we're clearly nowhere near where we want to be — to be top three in class, which is the target of this team moving forward.

"It might actually have a positive effect, but unfortunately, that positive effect also comes with more time. It's just going to take us more time to get to the positions where we want to be."

Main image courtesy of Getty Images.