Carlos Sainz isn’t pretending Williams’ Miami double-points finish is anything more than a first exhale after a breathless start to 2026. Yes, ninth and 10th for him and Alex Albon finally put something tangible on the board. But Sainz’s bigger takeaway was less about what Williams did right in Florida and more about what the result still said about the car’s underlying timeline — and the uncomfortable distance to the next benchmark up the road.
The upgrade package that helped drag the FW48 into a proper midfield fight in Miami wasn’t supposed to be a spring “fix”. Sainz revealed it had been pencilled in for the season opener in Australia, before development delays pushed it back by roughly two months. In other words, Williams has only just arrived at what it believed to be its starting point.
“We finally put on the upgrade on the car that was supposed to come to race one, because of all the delays we had at the beginning of the season,” Sainz explained after the race. “Now we’ve finally put on the car that was supposed to be the race one package.”
For a team that finished fifth in the constructors’ standings in 2025 — with Sainz taking two podiums — the early-season stumble has been jarring. Two points from the opening three races told its own story, and it wasn’t the story Williams wanted to be telling in a rules-reset year. Miami, at least, looked like evidence that the worst of the winter hangover is starting to clear.
Sainz described the step as “positive”, and there was some satisfaction in the manner of it: Williams wasn’t simply scooping up late-race charity. On pace, it could actually race the cars around it.
“Now it’s in the car, it’s performing at least at the level of the midfield cars,” he said, before adding a key caveat: Williams still has “a lot of overweight [issues] to set up the car”. Weight — and the knock-on effects it brings in tyre life, braking and balance — remains a theme Sainz keeps returning to, and Miami didn’t make it go away.
If Williams’ Sunday was about rejoining the midfield, it was also a sharp reminder of how the midfield itself has layers. Sainz pointed to Alpine as the clearest example. Franco Colapinto’s Alpine finished sixth, and Sainz trailed it by almost 20 seconds at the flag.
“Clearly, this weekend, we were I think sixth fastest, but then Alpine is our 20 seconds in front of us,” Sainz said. “It would have been 25-30 [seconds] without a safety car.”
That’s the frustrating part for Williams: a solid execution can still leave it looking small in the mirror of the team it wants to chase. Sainz even framed Alpine as being in “no-man’s land” — close enough to be visible, too far to be threatened.
“The Alpine [might be] in no-man’s land, but it’s still clearly in front of us in no-man’s land,” he said.
Where Sainz did sound genuinely lighter was in the comparison to the teams Williams expects to be scrapping with week-in, week-out. Miami suggested it could beat Haas, VCARB and Audi “on pace on merit” — and that matters when you’re trying to stabilise a season that began with firefighting.
“At least the Haas, the VCARBs, the Audis, I think we managed to beat them on pace on merit, which is something a race ago we were half a second behind in terms of race pace,” Sainz noted. “So we must have done a pretty decent step.”
It’s also telling that when the conversation drifted to the headline deficit — 82 seconds behind race-winner Kimi Antonelli’s Mercedes — Sainz cut in quickly, pointing out how many laps were chewed up under safety car. Not an excuse, more a correction: he’s guarding against anyone outside the garage mistaking points for progress on the scale Williams ultimately needs.
“So not where we want to be,” he said. “Still, I expect everyone at home to know this is still not where we want to be, even if it feels for everyone a bit of a relief, because getting two cars in the points and on merit is definitely a good step.”
The more revealing part of Sainz’s Miami debrief was his sense of timing. He isn’t selling a quick fix. He’s effectively asking for patience — while acknowledging the team’s own expectations were higher coming out of 2025.
“It’s still not where we expected to be at the end of last year when we were hoping for 2026,” he admitted.
And the turnaround, in his view, won’t be immediate. “It’s going to take some months to finish the turnaround,” Sainz said. “I think we’re going to need to get to the last third of the season to see a proper turnaround.”
That’s a sobering horizon in a championship that doesn’t pause for anyone. But Miami did at least offer Williams something it hadn’t consistently had in the opening stretch: a baseline that resembles the plan.
“From here, make this the new baseline and start improving,” Sainz insisted.
For now, that’s the fight — not to over-celebrate a P9, but to treat it as proof that when Williams stops tripping over its own calendar, the car can land in the mix. The next challenge is making sure Miami wasn’t simply the moment the season began, but the moment it finally stopped slipping away.
