What Williams staff are now privately saying about Carlos Sainz amid disappointing 2025 F1 campaign

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Carlos Sainz has found his first season at Williams Racing far more challenging than he or anyone would have expected.

Williams looked like they picked up one of the biggest coups in the Formula 1 driver market last year.

After replacing Logan Sargeant with Franco Colapinto halfway through 2024, confirming Carlos Sainz as Alex Albon’s teammate for the 2025 F1 season looked like a massive upgrade.

The Spaniard is a multiple race winner, and the experience he has gained at his four previous teams on the grid, including Ferrari and McLaren, would be invaluable to James Vowles’ team.

However, it’s been a much slower start than many anticipated, not helped by the fact that Albon has established himself as the strongest driver in F1’s midfield and currently sits seventh in the drivers’ championship.

Sainz believes ‘years of underinvestment’ at Williams is hampering one of his strengths, but even so, clumsy collisions with Liam Lawson and Oliver Bearman in recent races haven’t helped his cause.

The 31-year-old now sits 54 points behind Albon, and it would be a remarkable feat if he could close that gap in the remaining eight race weekends.

Journalist Nate Saunders has now shared the internal feeling among Williams staff about Sainz heading into the Azerbaijan Grand Prix.

READ MORE: Everything you need to know about Williams Racing from team principal to Mercedes relationship

Williams staff privately have no ‘feeling of panic’ towards Carlos Sainz after slow start to 2025

Saunders was speaking about Sainz on The Race F1 Podcast, and explaining the impact he’s had at Williams, he said: “If you can keep a lineup like that long term, obviously, it saves you a lot of headaches around driver market time.

“But the stability that comes with that obviously trickles down to the team in terms of the way you’re developing the car, the way that you’re able to kind of even talk to other talent about joining the team.

“If you say, look, the stability starts with the drivers and goes down [that’s] massively important.

“So, I still have faith that Williams will go the opposite direction of Daniel Ricciardo at McLaren.

“And I think that’s why, for most people looking at Carlos, and even if you talk to people at Williams, I don’t get the sense that there’s a massive feeling of panic there yet in terms of where Carlos is at.

“And I think it’s because they know that if and when he gets to that level of kind of flicking the switch, they’re in a really, really great spot.

“I don’t want to compare them to the new McLaren partnership, but, if you look at what Zak Brown did and said, I want to put two young guys together who I know are very talented, [they’re at] slightly different points in their career, but Williams have done similar with that.

“They’ve said if that partnership works, it’s long-term, you can get several years out of them both.

“So, I think that they’re still in a good position and the value for both of them is still pretty high.”

READ MORE: Five worst moments of Carlos Sainz’s F1 career including Austrian GP heartbreak and 200mph crash at Sochi

Carlos Sainz’s racing record at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix including 2024 Sergio Perez crash

Sainz is visiting Baku for the ninth time this weekend, and he’ll become the only driver to have competed on the street circuit with five different manufacturers.

Sergio Perez and Sainz had a dramatic crash in Azerbaijan last year, costing both drivers plenty of points and the Mexican driver his final opportunity to secure a podium with Red Bull.

Sainz has reached Q3 in each of the last six seasons, recording his best grid spot last year, where he started third behind Charles Leclerc and Oscar Piastri.

The Spaniard is yet to finish on the podium in Baku, with P5 being his best result thus far, recorded in 2023 and 2018 with Renault.

Albon’s best result this season for Williams is fifth, suggesting that the car is capable of very strong performances. Sainz just needs to hook up a complete weekend to show his full potential at his new team.