Carlos Sainz finally put a Williams on the box — and did it the hard way on a day when Baku threw just about everything at the field.
In a qualifying session chopped to bits by a record six red flags, Sainz briefly sat on provisional pole before his old Toro Rosso teammate Max Verstappen nicked it at the end. Front row nonetheless. Twenty-four hours later, Sainz converted the opportunity with a calm, clinical drive to third, ticking off his first podium in Williams blue and planting a flag in a season that’s asked plenty of questions of both driver and team.
The target was set the moment he climbed out of the car on Saturday. “Plan for tomorrow, try and stick it in the podium,” Sainz said after qualifying P2. Simple, direct, no bluster. He’d joked about summoning rain when the clouds gathered over the Caspian, but when it mattered on Sunday there was no weather roulette, no safety car chaos and no tyre lottery to grant him a free pass.
And that, according to Carlos Sainz Sr., is exactly what makes the result matter.
“This time it was a podium with Williams, which is an excellent result, especially because it wasn’t thanks to yellow flags or the Safety Car or rain or getting the tyres right,” Sainz Sr. told Marca. “A podium finish with Williams is a very special achievement. I think it must be very special for him because I don’t think he thought he would be able to achieve such a result, and in the end it happened.”
Strip away the sentiment and you’re left with a very tidy bit of Sunday execution. Sainz kept his elbows in through the first-lap skirmishes, managed the long runs between the walls without burning the tyres into oblivion, and had enough in hand to protect what he’d earned on Saturday. P3 may not change the title picture, but it does reset the conversation around Williams’ ceiling for the rest of 2025.
It also vindicates the grind. Sainz’s first season at Grove has been more shakedown than fairy tale; flashes of promise, a few missed chances, and that lingering question about whether the package could genuinely fight beyond the midfield. Baku offered the right blend of top speed and confidence under braking, sure, but podiums don’t just fall out of the sky on modern F1 Sundays. You still have to nail them.
For the family, there’s pride — and a nudge to keep the throttle pinned.
“Now he has to turn the page, keep working hard and think about the next one,” Sainz Sr. added. “Trying to have a good end to the season, continuing to learn, continuing to motivate and teaming up with Williams, and hoping that next year they will have a good car with all the rule changes that are coming.”
That last line is the drumbeat across the paddock. With new chassis and engine regulations arriving for 2026, teams are already split-braining the present and the future. A result like Baku buys goodwill and momentum inside a factory. It gives wind-tunnel hours a bit more purpose. It tells mechanics and engineers that, yes, there’s something to build on here.
It also tells Sainz what he already suspected: when he gets a car under him that behaves, he still knows exactly what to do with it.
A final word on that qualifying chaos: six red flags, a circuit that kept biting, and Sainz — of all people — looking very comfortable at the edge. Verstappen made it back-to-back poles, as he does, but the Williams was in the conversation. That alone felt like a small shock to the system.
There are seven rounds left to sketch the rest of this story. Baku may not be a turning point in capital letters, but it’s the sort of afternoon that changes how rivals race you and how a team races itself. The next time Sainz rolls up to a street circuit or a low-drag weekend and sees a front row on the cards, there won’t be any need for a rain dance. Just the memory of how it looks from the podium.
