Carlos Sainz’s biggest impact at Williams was felt far greater than scoring two podiums in his first season with the team.
Sainz had a tricky start on-track with Williams after joining from Ferrari, but by the end of the year he and team-mate Alex Albon had very similar seasons, just in reverse - and with Sainz enjoying the higher peaks in terms of results.
Those podiums were greatly enjoyed by driver and team but they are treated mainly as a symbol of something deeper. What Sainz has brought to Williams has undoubtedly elevated it. He is a proven race winner with experience of multiple teams, is an intelligent and hard worker, and he is also relentless.
Albon noted it has been “definitely different in terms of culture and mindset” having Sainz alongside him and “much more equal in the way that the teams treat us” compared to his previous team-mates Franco Colapinto, Logan Sargeant and Nicholas Latifi.
“I think the biggest thing I've learned from Carlos is more the non-driving side of things, the way that we conduct meetings and develop the car in the simulator and go about our free practice programmes,” said Albon.
“Things like that which you can see the experience with Carlos in that way.”
And remember, Albon was paired with Max Verstappen (to brutal effect) at Red Bull for one and a half season, then worked within the team for another year beyond that. So even though his recent Williams references are more underwhelming, Albon knows what top-level operators do.
So does team principal James Vowles. He has raved about Sainz for a long time, having made signing him for 2025 such a massive target last year.
“It's been better than I expected,” Vowles said. “There's some elements to him I didn't know until he came here.
“When you put pressure on him, he gets better. He needs pressure to effectively perform in a better way, and I didn't know that about him, but that's a great trait to have as a driver.
“The level of detail feedback, when he's able to go to another level of detail that's very rare for a driver to have. And again, I didn't know that before I signed him. I just knew he was very good at working with teams.
“And his collaboration and his culture, his beliefs, his values, are exactly the same as Alex. You can see that happening here. You're never sure when you sign someone, is that really going to be how it is, but the answer’s yes.”
Sainz feels the biggest influences he's had is through set-up development work, "going around the loop of testing different things and different ideas" to see what works on the car and what doesn't.
He has particularly impressed Williams with his work with the aerodynamics and vehicle dynamics teams in relaying his experience in the car to specific items of improvement.
“He has an ability to drag you through the data and take you exactly to a point where he's suffering with a balance issue, which then allows you to dig deep inside it,” said Vowles.
“So it's that level of detail that he brings.”
A necessary turnaround
While this sort of intangible benefit has fit nicely with Vowles’ mantra that the results in 2025 didn’t matter compared to the bigger picture, it is undoubtedly handy that Sainz’s results did improve markedly by the end of the year.
Though his pace compared well to Albon from early in the year, there were several setbacks that created a significant points imbalance for most of the season.
Albon racked up a series of impressive results early on as Williams came out of the blocks flying as F1’s lead midfield team. He was in the top five three times in the first seven races, a run in which he scored nearly four times as many points as Sainz did.
“The beginning of the year, it took longer than I thought, and than Carlos thought as well, to really get used to the Williams because it's a very different car,” said Vowles.
But after 16 races, while Albon was still ahead of Mercedes driver Kimi Antonelli in seventh place in the championship on 70 points, Sainz was 18th and had just 16 points.
Were this 25 years ago and the season ended then, Sainz’s first year with Williams would go down as a near-disaster on-track partly mitigated by his underlying pace and with the caveat that off-track Williams was very happy with its new signing.
Fortunately for Sainz, this is 2025, and the season was long.
After 8 rounds
8. Albon - 42 pts
12. Sainz - 12 pts
After 16 rounds
8. Albon - 70 pts
18. Sainz - 16 pts
End of season
8. Albon - 73 pts
9. Sainz - 64 pts
He was vindicated for his belief that he just needed things to start coming together in a standout way in Azerbaijan, where he took advantage of a mixed-up weekend to finish an excellent third, and capitalised on McLaren’s misfortune to add a second podium at the penultimate race in Qatar. Sainz scored 48 points across the final eight races – Albon just three – as their fortunes were almost completely reversed and they ended the year eighth and ninth in the standings, just nine points in Albon’s favour.
And that combined with the off-track benefits means Sainz’s Williams move has started resoundingly well.
"You always have high expectations," said Sainz.
"But for sure the expectations were something that I really tried to control before coming into this year, knowing that there was going to be obviously a reset in my results and what was possibly achievable in my first year in Williams.
"If you would have told me before, the year when I signed my Williams contract in August ‘24, that there was going to be a couple of podiums, a sprint podium and this upward trend, I would have definitely taken it there."
The Sainz/Albon dynamic
It would do Albon a disservice to suggest Sainz came in and said ‘this isn’t good enough, this is how it should be done, this needs to be better’ – as if, with Albon as lead driver, Williams was just plodding along with loads of low-hanging fruit there to be snatched.
Yes, it is different from the past. Albon is not the undisputed number one now - something he readily acknowledges - and some believe that the way Vowles has talked about Sainz since openly courting him early in 2024 means an even bigger balance of power shift is inevitable.
But so far Albon has only stressed the benefits of being alongside a quality driver with equal status.
“I could definitely say I had the majority of the preferential treatment in previous years,” Albon said.
“In terms of us two working together more backwards and forwards – we call it 'feedback ping-pong', where we're just kind of having the same opinions about the car.
“We speak in a very similar language. Carlos is more experienced than I am, but in terms of our age and our approach, we handle things in a very similar way.
“In terms of pushing me, it's great to have someone with a different dataset to have a look at, different driving style to me. We want similar things in the car, we actually normally arrive to qualifying with a very similar set-up.
“When you have a team-mate who's a step up, you learn more. There's more to learn in terms of your driving style. There's some corners that you were previously quick at, which you're now the same as [your team-mate]. And there are some corners that you need to learn, adapt, drive differently.
“I'm sure it goes the other way for Carlos, too. So it's been good to see.”
Another benefit of Sainz joining is that, in a way, Albon’s voice has been amplified.
Albon has previously admitted that there were certain car limitations in long corners and those combining braking with lateral load that he’d stressed needed to be improved, but they weren’t able to be improved in the short-term. So he had learned to live with them as best as possible.
Sainz arriving - and struggling to do what Albon could with certain Williams car characteristics in those corners - gave him something to prioritise and be vocal about, which revived it as an issue and reinforced the severity of it. Maybe it even helped contextualise what it would unlock. Albon was already saying ‘this needs to be better’, Sainz had some experience from Ferrari to inform ‘this is the benefit it will bring’.
“He correlates with Alex really well,” said Vowles. “They both have exactly the same drive in what they want out of the car, which gives you strength of knowledge.
“I know it sounds odd, but one voice perhaps doesn't drive you. Two voices saying the same thing absolutely gives you direction on it.”
It’s just one example of where Sainz helped Williams - while keeping in mind that Albon shouldn’t just be treated as a passenger in the project now.
And it has allowed Williams to make its car faster through 2025 not with upgrades but by improving its simulation tools, communication, ways of working, and the car’s set-up and balance.
Don’t underestimate Albon’s best season yet
It would be risky to overstate Sainz’s contribution relative to Albon, though.
Points-wise Albon was still the bedrock of Williams’s run to fifth in the constructors’ championship.
And with Sainz having the start to the year he did, regardless of how much the blend was his fault versus misfortune, Albon meant Williams made hay while the sun shone, bagged the results it needed given its aggressive approach to parking car development, and had a handy points buffer over its rivals to manage nearly all year long.
“I would say my best season yet,” Albon says of his year.
“Obviously the car, I think, takes credit for most of that. I said it before, I haven't changed so much my application into this year, but the car and what the guys and girls have done at the factory have made a huge step this year.
“I've been with this team for four years now and this has been clearly the biggest step out of the four years from year to year.
Williams since Albon's arrival
2022: 10th, 8 pts, 1.4% of available pts
2023: 7th, 28 pts, 4.7% of available pts
2024: 9th, 17 pts, 2.6% of available pts
2025: 5th, 137 pts, 21.1% of available pts
“It's been enjoyable, been fun to be able to race against some of the top teams in some certain tracks.
“Towards the of the year, not ideal, but generally pace has been strong – just either myself, I've made a couple of mistakes in Vegas and Baku that kind of stand out to me, but then the other ones have just been just not going my way, kind of what it was like for Carlos at beginning of the year.”
Part of the late struggles has been Albon’s car ending up slightly more on a knife-edge balance-wise after Vowles admitted “we've gone slightly wrong on set-up”, which he puts down to the team’s own “communication”.
Early in the season, were you to suggest a Williams driver would stand on the podium in 2025, Albon would be the overwhelming favourite. It is slightly unfortunate that did not happen, and you could forgive a little bitterness on Albon’s part as he watched a driver who only joined this year getting the big results while he missed out after being part of the journey for four years.
But there’s no sense of that from Albon at all.
“I would say I’m just very proud of the team, because I feel like each year we've been making steps forward, but it just seems to be that things are starting to click now and as a team, as a unit, we seem to be dialing in,” he said.
“The gap from P10 to P5 is smaller than the gap from P5 to P4. So we know that we have to, we've still got a long road ahead of us.
“But I'm hoping my podium chances come a little bit sooner rather than later!”
