Carlos Sainz didn’t need timing sheets to tell him the story of Hungary. Watching Charles Leclerc park a Ferrari on pole while his own Williams started 13th gave him all the data he needed — and a clear brief for Grove.
The Spaniard’s verdict is blunt: Williams needs a philosophical reset to cure a car that flatters on straights and stumbles through long, loaded corners. It’s not a new problem for the team, but Sainz has now put a fine point on it after living both sides of the equation.
“We have relatively poor aero characteristics in long corners, where you need to hold the downforce from entry to mid corner,” he said after the Hungaroring weekend. “That’s why long straights and sharp, short corners are good for us. The moment we get into long combined corners like Barcelona, Hungary, Qatar, the car really struggles. It needs a very big design philosophy change.”
It’s not just the chassis. The switch from Ferrari to Mercedes power has been an education in itself — and not only for Sainz. Lewis Hamilton, who made the opposite move for 2025, has voiced similar points.
“The way you use the gears, the downshifts, how it goes into engine braking… the transition from brake migration to engine braking is different,” Sainz explained. “You have to change your driving style, for sure.”
That learning curve has been steep, and the scoreboard has reflected it at times. Sainz has had scrappy weekends and brighter ones, with flashes of qualifying form and a few Sundays that drifted away. Hungary tilted toward the positive: he out-qualified and out-raced Alex Albon, and crucially, he left with a clear map of what the FW47 can’t do — and what it can.
The rub is development. Team principal James Vowles has been explicit about the big picture, with Williams prioritising the sweeping 2026 rule change over pouring resources into chasing short-term gains now. Sainz is on board with that.
“It’s been a strong start together in how we want to develop the team and the car,” he said. “We’re all very aligned and optimistic. The problem is we’re stuck in the middle of a year where we cannot actually develop a car that has clear weaknesses. We’re not putting it in the wind tunnel.”
So the target shifts from upgrades to execution. Sainz has been cycling through setups, then circling back to what worked earlier — the same baseline that delivered tidy Saturdays in Miami and Imola. Clean weekends are the currency now, even if the payoff depends heavily on the circuit profile.
“If we’d had a clean one like this at Spa, Miami, or Imola, we would’ve scored a lot of points,” he noted. “Second half of the season, I’ll seek consistency with the setup and make sure we execute.”
In other words: keep the knife sharp, even if the sword arrives in 2026.
