“Lucky bastard.”
Toto Wolff’s scrawl on a gift bag to James Vowles did the rounds after Baku, and it landed exactly as intended: as a wink from an old ally after Williams hauled itself back onto a Formula 1 podium.
Carlos Sainz’s third place in Azerbaijan wasn’t a fluke, whatever the Austrian’s banter suggests. It was the product of a team that kept its head while the rest of qualifying went a little feral — six red flags, a new F1 record — and a driver who turned a front-row start into something tangible on Sunday. Sainz stuck a banker on a wild Q3 to sit on provisional pole before only Max Verstappen edged him, then managed the race with the kind of calm that belies the chaos that usually surrounds Baku. By the flag: P3, Sainz’s first trophy in Williams blue and the team’s first rostrum since that rain-soaked Spa 2021 outlier.
For Vowles, it was more than a box ticked. It was his first podium as team principal since taking over at Grove, validation on live TV for a rebuild that’s been deliberately methodical rather than flashy. The former Mercedes strategist knows better than most how thin the margins are in this sport; he also knows when to enjoy them. Wolff — formerly a Williams shareholder before his Mercedes era — made sure the congratulations came with a smile and a jab, and then clarified the sentiment behind the shot.
The “lucky bastard,” he said later, was pure dressing. Team principals tend to catch the bullets and the bouquets, but on this day it was a group effort. Driver nailed it, pit stops held up, decisions landed, and the trend line at Williams is pointing the right way. No argument there.
The bigger picture matters. Williams has been talking up 2026 for a while, but 2025 hasn’t been written off — far from it. Baku pushed the team past the 100‑point mark for the season and tightened its grip on fifth in the Constructors’ standings. After Azerbaijan, Williams sits on 101 points, with a 29‑point cushion over Racing Bulls behind. If you’re scoring progress, that’s it, in ink.
Sainz’s podium also felt like an overdue exhale. His first season at Williams has had to blend patience with proof, and Baku finally gave him a weekend where the story matched the graft. The car gave him a platform, he delivered a clean lap when the session resembled a demolition derby, and he brought it home on Sunday. Nothing lucky about that sequence.
Vowles, meanwhile, got to savor a moment he’s helped construct from the long game: better staffing, sharper ops, a culture that’s starting to look like the one he left at Brackley. And on the other side of the paddock, Wolff could afford to enjoy it, too. He knows exactly how much work it takes to make a result like this look simple.
There’ll be more wild qualifying sessions, more weekends that need a cool head, and plenty of times the roulette wheel doesn’t stop on blue. But Williams has put a stake in this season — not as an afterthought to 2026, but as a live project that’s becoming harder to ignore.
Call it luck if you like. From where Vowles and Sainz stood on Sunday, it looked a lot like execution.
