Sainz snatches Baku podium for Williams — and isn’t keeping score with Hamilton
Carlos Sainz didn’t just put Williams back on a grand prix podium. He did it before Lewis Hamilton managed one in Ferrari red. That’s a neat headline for the season’s biggest driver swap — the man Maranello moved on picking up silverware with Grove while his replacement waits for a Sunday rostrum — but Sainz isn’t interested in the comparison. He’s too busy making Williams relevant on merit.
Baku can make anyone look like a hero or a passenger, and qualifying was the full circus: gusting winds, a spitting track, six cars in the wall and red flags thrown around like confetti. In the chaos, Sainz threaded a lap between stoppages and rain to bag a front-row start, only Max Verstappen finding more when the session rebooted.
The real test was always going to be Sunday. Track position is currency in Azerbaijan, and there were faster cars queued up behind the blue-and-white FW47. It didn’t matter. Sainz managed the afternoon with the poise of a driver who’s been here before — because he has — and carried Williams to third place at the flag, the team’s first podium in a full-length grand prix since this very race in 2017.
“I always said to the team from the beginning that whenever a first big opportunity of fighting for a podium comes, as long as we have everything under control and nothing goes wrong and we prove to everyone what we’re doing… then I’ll be OK,” Sainz said, smiling the kind of smile that comes with relief and a little vindication. “It’s exactly what ended up happening today.”
This wasn’t a fluke. The Spaniard has been quick since the season began, even if the box score didn’t always show it. “We’ve had good pace this year, we just didn’t have many opportunities to show it,” he added. “Today we had a very good opportunity to show our very good pace, and we managed to stay on the podium.”
The sweetness is obvious. Sainz has stood on bigger steps with faster cars, but doing it in a Williams — a team rebuilding its edges and its belief — hits different. It’s the kind of podium that can change the temperature inside a factory.
It also lands with a bit of narrative spice. Hamilton’s blockbuster move to Ferrari was the axis on which silly season spun, and on pure stature alone, it will define 2025. But the seven-time champion’s best flashes so far have come in sprints, and the grand prix podium remains elusive for now. Sainz? He’s not keeping a tally.
“What everyone else does is not my business, to be honest,” he said when the inevitable comparison came up. “What I care about is that the first opportunity that I had to score a podium with Williams, and the first opportunity Williams had to score a podium, we took it, we scored it, and there it is.”
If there’s a through line to Sainz’s start at Williams, it’s composure. He’s been consistently sharp as he’s learned new systems and a car with its own quirks. Results lagged, but the speed was there — and the team knew it. “Out of everyone that’s changed teams — which is not an easy task nowadays — I’ve been very competitive from the first race, very quick, but I didn’t have results with me,” he said. “In the end, they did. Life has taught me many times that you have a run of misfortune or bad performances, but then suddenly life gives you back if you keep working hard with something really sweet like this.”
It’s easy to get carried away after a Baku outlier. But this didn’t feel like opportunism alone. It felt like a driver and team executing when the window opened, holding their nerve under pressure, and moving the project a notch forward. That’s what Williams hired Sainz to do.
And on the other side of the garage? The message is clear: give him a sniff, and he’ll bring it home. The bigger picture might yet belong to Verstappen, McLaren and the title fight, but in the margins where momentum grows, Sainz and Williams just had a very good Sunday.
