Carlos Sainz has spent long enough in Formula 1 to know which ideas get you polite smiles in the paddock and which ones get you escorted straight into a lengthy meeting with the commercial rights holder.
So when he admits he’s been sitting on a “slightly crazy” concept and wasn’t even sure he should say it out loud, you can see why. It isn’t a tweak to parc fermé or a gentler tyre allocation. It’s a full-blown rewiring of how F1 decides who’s the best.
Sainz’s pitch is disarmingly simple: take the drivers out of the teams.
In his ideal world, drivers wouldn’t be contracted to Ferrari, Mercedes, Williams or anyone else. They’d be employed by Formula 1 itself and rotated through the grid on a fixed schedule. Twenty races? Fine: two races in each car. Everyone gets the same machinery over the season, just at different points, and the drivers’ title becomes—at least in theory—an unfiltered measure of who’s actually the quickest and smartest across changing tools.
“I’ve always imagined a Formula 1 where the manufacturers and the drivers are separate,” Sainz said, acknowledging in the same breath that it’s “never” going to happen. The point, for him, is the purity of the contest: “all the drivers would have exactly the same chance of winning the World Championship.”
The kicker is what happens to the teams. The constructors’ championship doesn’t disappear; it morphs. Points scored while you’re in, say, the Mercedes for those two weekends would go to Mercedes, regardless of which driver is in the seat. Over a season, each team still gets a spread of talent cycling through, and its final total becomes a composite of how effective its car is across a rotating cast.
On paper, it’s a fascinating thought experiment. In practice, it detonates half of what F1 sells.
The sport’s modern identity is built on the marriage—sometimes the arranged kind—between star drivers and giant organisations. Fans don’t just follow “the championship”; they follow Leclerc at Ferrari, Hamilton’s late-career choices, a team’s academy kid finally getting his shot. Sponsors don’t sign up for a randomised allocation of driver weekends; they pay for consistent faces, consistent markets, consistent storylines. And teams certainly don’t invest at F1’s scale for the privilege of handing their car to rivals’ drivers twice a year and hoping for a clean debrief afterwards.
Then there’s the technical reality. Even in a relatively stable rules era, drivers and engineers spend months calibrating the details that turn a car from “quick” into “driveable at the limit”: brake shapes, steering maps, differential settings, simulator correlation, procedural habits. Under Sainz’s format, you’d be asking a driver to drop into a new environment, learn its operational language, understand its tyre behaviour and exploit its quirks—then hop out again just as the relationship starts to click. Some would thrive on that chaos. Others would lose half their value because their greatness is in deep integration, not rapid adaptation.
Which, perhaps unintentionally, is where Sainz’s idea gets interesting.
It’s the rare “fix F1” concept that actually tests a skill set drivers claim to have: adaptability. We hear it all the time—how the great ones can jump in anything and be fast. A rotating-car championship would force that claim into the open. Two races isn’t much. Make a small mistake with the setup direction on Friday and you’ve burned half your allocation before Sunday’s lights even go out.
Sainz himself is speaking from an unusually candid place. He’s at Williams and knows what that means in the current ecosystem. In 2026 so far he’s down in 14th in the drivers’ standings on six points, while Williams sits eighth in the constructors’ on 11. That context doesn’t invalidate his argument, but it does explain the lens: a proven race winner living the reality that the “best driver” doesn’t always have access to the “best car”, and that the championship is as much a reward for choosing the right project at the right time as it is for raw performance.
You can read Sainz’s proposal as idealism, or as frustration, or as a driver articulating something fans often mutter after a dull Sunday: this isn’t a level playing field. But there’s also a sly acknowledgement of how the sport is changing. As F1 pushes harder into entertainment, and as it leans into the driver as a global brand, the tension between the “driver championship” as a meritocracy and the “constructor championship” as the series’ economic engine isn’t going away.
Sainz isn’t pretending his format is realistic. He basically laughs it off before he finishes describing it. Yet it sticks in the mind because it asks a question F1 never wants to answer too honestly: if you stripped out the machinery advantage, who would we really be talking about?
And maybe that’s the point. Not to propose a blueprint, but to remind everyone—teams, fans, and a sport increasingly comfortable with competitive imbalance as long as the show holds up—that the simplest way to make a “proper Drivers’ Championship” would be to stop tying a driver’s fate so tightly to one piece of carbon fibre.
F1 will never do it. But you can see why a driver might daydream about it on a quiet flight home.
