Headline: “Box me.” “Negative.” The Williams radio call that put Albon ahead of Sainz at Monza
Williams didn’t broadcast it, but the message was clear enough in the garage: Carlos Sainz wanted a pit stop, the pit wall wanted team orders. At Monza, the team won that argument.
Untelevised radio from the Italian Grand Prix reveals the moment Sainz was told to move over for Alex Albon as their strategies diverged and the Spaniard’s mediums faded. Running eighth and ninth early on, Sainz missed the second chicane and Williams seized the opening: swap positions, keep DRS, don’t waste time fighting.
Sainz pushed back. His request was simple—“box me at the end of this lap”—arguing that pitting would avoid the drag of easing off to execute a swap. Gaetan Jego, his race engineer, wasn’t buying it. Pitting, he warned, would dump the No. 55 Williams into a sluggish DRS queue of five cars. The call stood: lift into Turn 4, keep the line, let Albon go, use the tow.
Sainz relented on Lap 25, staying right through Curva Grande and yielding into the second chicane. It was pragmatic, if not painless. Albon, on hards and with cleaner pace, pressed on to seventh—his fourth points finish in six races—while Sainz’s afternoon unraveled late with contact against Oliver Bearman’s Haas that left him 11th.
Afterwards, Sainz sounded more measured than aggrieved. “I needed the bigger picture before we did the move,” he said in the Monza paddock. “Once they explained, I let him by.” In other words, talk me through why, and I’ll do it. Williams eventually did.
The subtext matters here because this isn’t the first time Sainz and Williams have rubbed against the grain over intra-team protocol. Back in Miami, Sainz was left unimpressed by how a call played out when he believed Albon—managing a reliability concern—wouldn’t come through. “That’s not how I go racing,” he snapped on the radio back then, later prompting team principal James Vowles to pledge tighter communication.
Sunday in Italy felt like the course correction. Williams spotted the game-state early: Sainz not loving the mediums, Albon looking racier on a long first stint, and a midfield pack prone to turning every stop into a trap. Monza’s DRS trains are brutal; once you’re in them, you stay there. Getting the quicker car free was the priority.
Would a Sainz pit stop have saved his race? Not with what Jego laid out. Dropping behind a five-car chain likely would’ve handcuffed him to their rhythm until the flag. The swap, in contrast, kept one Williams moving and protected the double finish if Sainz could hang in Albon’s wake. He tried. The late clash with Bearman sealed the zero for car 55, but the logic stands: one set of points banked is better than none in this midfield dogfight.
There’s also the relationship piece. Sainz didn’t explode on the radio—he negotiated. He asked for alternatives, pressed for rationale, then complied when the plan was clear. That’s a sign of a driver still leading from the cockpit, and a team learning how to talk him through moments that matter. Vowles wanted cleaner lines of communication; Monza offered evidence they’re getting there.
The broader story of the race may have been McLaren choreographing Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris, but Williams had its own, quieter balancing act to execute. They chose the call that maximized return on the day. Seventh for Albon says they were right.
The tension will always be there—Sainz is a prideful racer, and Albon’s speed makes the internal calculus tricky. But this was a professional, grown-up bit of team play at 340 km/h. It didn’t put both cars in the points, yet it showed Williams can make the ruthless, timely choices that count across a season.
Monza, as ever, punished hesitation. Williams didn’t hesitate.
