‘Some in Ferrari already regret it’: Steiner pounces as Sainz hits Baku podium while Hamilton waits
Guenther Steiner has never been shy with a verdict, and he’s not starting now. In the wake of Carlos Sainz’s Baku podium — delivered in Williams blue — the former Haas boss says there are people inside Ferrari who already regret swapping Sainz for Lewis Hamilton.
Sainz, who was told last year his four-season Ferrari run would end to make way for the seven-time world champion, qualified on the front row in Azerbaijan and converted that into a measured P3. It was Williams’ first full-points podium since 2017, a result that landed like a thunderclap across the paddock. Hamilton, by contrast, started 12th and rose to eighth after Ferrari shuffled the order late on.
Steiner’s take, on The Red Flags podcast, was as blunt as you’d expect: some at Maranello “feel regret,” he said, even if management won’t admit it. His reasoning? Sainz was a known quantity who delivered without fuss. Hamilton, still finding his feet at Ferrari, has brought noise, scrutiny, and questions the team’s had to spend precious energy answering.
“They wouldn’t have all the interference from outside of Lewis not performing,” Steiner argued, suggesting Ferrari could’ve kept heads down and chased performance rather than fielding constant why-doesn’t-he-like-the-car queries. He also pointed to the obvious: Hamilton isn’t cheap. “Is it a worthwhile investment? Maybe not,” he added, implying the return so far doesn’t match the outlay.
It’s a stinging comparison because the backdrop is so stark. Sainz left Ferrari expecting to stay — he’d said he was “99% sure” — then pivoted to a multi-year Williams deal. That was a risk on paper: Williams finished second-last in 2024, a world away from Ferrari’s runner-up campaign and 635-point cushion. Yet it’s Sainz spraying champagne this season, not the man who replaced him.
In Baku, the Spaniard put in the sort of Sainz performance the Ferrari garage knew well: sharp on a single lap, relentless in race trim, zero drama. It came after a string of lean Sundays too — his best results before Baku were P8s in Jeddah and Imola, and he’d gone six races without scoring. When it mattered, he kept it tidy and cashed in.
Sainz didn’t hide what it meant. He called the podium “even more” special than his first with McLaren back in 2019, a nod to the slog of bedding in at Grove and the scrutiny that followed his move. The vibe around Williams has felt light, pragmatic, quietly ambitious. Sainz fits that mold.
Over at Ferrari, the picture’s more complicated. Hamilton’s yet to step on the rostrum and trails Charles Leclerc in the head-to-heads so far. None of that is terminal for a driver still settling into a new car and a haematite-red pressure cooker — but it’s enough for the chatter to start. Ferrari finished only eighth and ninth in Baku, a result that stung in isolation and looked worse next to their former driver on the box.
Steiner, predictably, went full “gas” when asked if Sainz’s podium proved Ferrari made the wrong call. It’s not that he doesn’t rate Hamilton — he made a point of saying he respects him — but he questioned the trade-offs: the unrest, the narrative load, the time spent explaining rather than extracting. With Sainz, he said, Ferrari had stability. With Hamilton, they’ve got a different kind of spotlight.
There’s another layer here: Sainz has carried himself like a driver who never needed to “prove” anything to anyone. No public excuses, no finger-pointing. He questioned things when they were off, then moved on. It reads as mundane, but it’s often the difference between treading water and banking results when the door cracks open.
Does that mean Ferrari unquestionably got it wrong? That’s a longer season story. Hamilton’s adaptation curve at Mercedes wasn’t instant either, and you don’t sign a driver with his record for a few flyaways. But the optics in late September are hard to ignore: the man Ferrari let go just put Williams on the podium, and the man they signed is still grinding for a first top three.
Inside Grove, they’re smiling. Inside Maranello, they’re bristling. And somewhere in a podcast studio, Guenther is nodding like he called it — because, of course, he did.
