Carlos Sainz didn’t need long in a Williams to spot something odd about the way it leans on its tyres. Now, with Formula 1’s 2026 reset exposing every weakness in the field, he and Alex Albon are talking openly about a trait that’s followed this team across seasons: a recurring reluctance to properly load the inside-front tyre in certain corners — and the knock-on loss of front-end bite that comes with it.
It’s the sort of handling quirk drivers usually describe with a shrug and a “that’s just our car”. But the timing matters. Williams came into this year off a strong 2025, finishing fifth in the Constructors’ Championship, only to open 2026 on the back foot with two points after Sainz’s ninth place in China. In the early races, the team has effectively treated chunks of track time as live development running, and the drivers have been clear that this inside-front limitation is one of the items they want solved, not managed.
Albon has lived with it longer, and he framed it as an old problem made louder by new circumstances. With the 2026 rules bringing an overall downforce reduction, he feels the Williams’ tendency in certain sequences — where the inside-front contact patch seems to diminish — has been pushed further into the spotlight.
“Lack of inside front grip has been an issue on our car since I’ve been in the car, so that’s nothing new,” Albon said. “It’s just that I think some of the issues that we had were exacerbating that problem.
“Five years ago, I think one of our weakest corners was Turn 9 and Turn 10 in Bahrain, that double left-hander. I think that was always a comment.”
The phrasing is telling: not a dramatic “it’s three-wheeling”, not a tyre visibly dangling in the air, but a more subtle loss of effective contact — that moment where the car seems to be asking the outside tyres to do a job the front axle can’t share evenly. Albon insisted it’s not literally lifting the wheel; it’s just not working the tyre like the other three.
“It’s not really in the air,” he said. “If you look at it, it’s just it’s not got quite the contact patch of the other three tyres on the ground.
“It’s been a big focus point so far this year, and we’ve been attributing a lot of FP1 sessions to see if we can improve.”
Sainz’s account adds a different layer because, in his words, the sensation surprised him immediately when he first sampled the car. He traces it back to the moment he got his initial feel for Williams machinery, and he’s blunt that it required an adaptation — learning how to drive around it, then helping the engineers set the car up around it.
“Yes, it is actually a comment I gave to the team all the way back in 2025 as soon as I jumped in a Williams,” Sainz said. “It seemed like the Williams had this vehicle dynamic characteristic that, let’s say, surprised me from the first lap I did in Abu Dhabi, and I had to get my head around it at the beginning of the season, drive around it, set the car up around it, and we managed to obviously get it better and develop it over the last year.”
The frustrating part for Williams is that “better” in 2025 hasn’t meant “gone” in 2026. If anything, the regulation change has dragged it back into view.
“But as soon as we changed regs and the downforce of the car came down overall with these new regulations, the problem flared up again, and it’s something we are trying to address, investigate,” Sainz added.
This is where the story stops being a simple “driver doesn’t like corner X” complaint and becomes more revealing about Williams’ early-season approach. Both drivers have pointed to development priorities: weight reduction, adding downforce, and addressing that inside-front behaviour. There’s an acceptance that points are being sacrificed in the short term to understand the car properly — and, crucially, to make sure upgrades fix the right things rather than just moving the lap time number for a weekend.
Sainz said the feedback from him and Albon has been specific: when it happens, how it builds, what they feel through the corner. That’s the kind of language engineers need if there’s something “embedded into the car” driving it — the loaded phrase Sainz used that suggests more than a tweakable setup annoyance.
“I think, as drivers, we’ve given very clear directions of when it’s happening, how it’s happening, and what we feel when it’s happening,” he said. “The team is doing everything they can now to try and understand it, to see what’s embedded into the car that might be creating this phenomenon.”
Williams’ timing is, at least, unusually favourable. F1 finds itself in an unplanned April pause following the cancellation of the Bahrain and Saudi Arabian Grands Prix. With no mandated factory shutdown attached to that gap, teams have been left to work at full speed — analysing the opening rounds and feeding it straight into their development programmes.
For a team like Williams, which is trying to claw back performance while also learning what its new car wants, it’s the kind of break that can decide whether the early-season narrative becomes “missed opportunity” or “smart reset”.
Sainz expects a major push ahead of Miami, but he also offered the reminder that upgrades only matter in context. Bringing a “big step” is meaningless if everyone else brings one too — and in a new rules era, the midfield is rarely polite enough to wait.
“I expect that the team will do a big, big push over that month to come up with something for Miami that is a good step forward,” he said. “At the same time, in this sport, everything is relative.
“So you can bring a big step forward, then if the others bring a big step then you haven’t moved forward – you’re still three tenths behind the midfield. So, it’s more about how much of a bigger step forward you bring to the rest of the teams.”
He’s also clear on the basics: the FW48 needs mass taken out and load added, and Miami is the first realistic marker for how much Williams can move the needle.
“I hope that in that case, obviously, we know we have a lot of weight to take out of the car. We have a lot of downforce to add. It will be how much we are able to do for Miami.”
For now, the most interesting part is that Sainz and Albon are aligned — not just in describing the issue, but in how they’re framing it. This isn’t a driver-to-driver difference in preference. It’s a shared diagnosis of a behaviour that’s been lurking in Williams’ DNA for years, and which the 2026 cars have made harder to hide. Whether the team can finally engineer it out — rather than simply teach its drivers to live with it — may decide how quickly this season stops being a salvage job and starts looking like progress again.
