20/07/2025 10:10
Carlos Sainz has explained how he is grateful for the "very
painful" failures Williams has experienced in the 2025 season.
Williams is enjoying its best F1 season since 2017, sitting in
fifth place in the constructors' standings with 59 points at the
halfway stage. It is its biggest haul since its 83-point total in
2017. Sainz joined Williams from Ferrari for this year after being
impressed by the sales pitch James Vowles presented in his
rebuilding plans for the nine-time constructors' champions to
return to the front of F1. Williams has taken a surprise step
forward in 2025 to enjoy its best results in nearly a decade, with
Sainz explaining how the boost in performance, and racing the top
teams, is giving the Grove-squad a head-start in learning, and
exposing operational procedures and weaknesses for 2026. "A more
competitive car is stressing the system of how we do things and the
way we work," Sainz told the media when asked by RacingNews365 if
it was a good thing for Williams to suffer the car failures in 2025
ahead of the rules change for '26. "At times this year, we've been
able to fight Red Bull, Mercedes and even Ferrari in Miami and at
Imola, and it has exposed not only our reliability issues, but also
the way we look at strategy, at Q1 and Q2 and the way we execute
the weekend. "It is giving us a great opportunity to learn a lot of
the things we could learn next year with a more competitive car.
"But thanks to this much more competitive car, it has already given
us a heads up on everything we need to improve and the margins of
improvement if we want to fight the guys at the front. "It is a
great test for the team, but a very painful one, because you see a
car that can get points almost every weekend, and we keep finding
different little things that don't allow us to. "We're stressing
the system to know exactly where we need to get better to be at a
championship-level."
