Carlos Sainz Laments ‘Tough’ First Half-Season At Williams

It’s been a “tough” first half-season at Williams for former Ferrari driver Carlos Sainz.

In Austria, his eleventh race for the Grove-based outfit, Sainz’s season hit a new low when he suffered a car problem before the formation lap.

“We need to see if there’s any connection between what happened in qualifying and what happened in the race,” Sainz told Spanish reporters.

“A lot of things have been happening to us lately.”

Indeed, Sainz had an upshifting fault in Australia, multiple problems at his home Spanish GP, cooling issues in Canada, and technical problems in both qualifying and before the grand prix at the Red Bull Ring.

“The truth is that this first half of the year has been a bit tough in that sense because things keep happening to us,” he continued.

“At some point all this bad luck will end and things will finally work out for us,” he told DAZN.

Sainz acknowledged that the problems have not been isolated to his car.

“Yes, we had another problem with Alex (Albon),” he confirmed. “We need to find out why we’re having so many problems in qualifying and the race, because we’ve had several weekends of problems with brakes, engines, overheating.

“We’re a bit weak in that regard, but we have no choice but to grit our teeth and see how we can improve.”

However, Williams’ boss James Vowles has always been publicly open about the team’s current restructuring phase, and the fact that the real development priority for 2026 is the all-new project for the 2026 rules change.

“It’s part of the journey we’re on at Williams,” Sainz confirms.

“We have to rebuild and restructure the team, which, as we can see, still has many problems and many things to improve. We’ll keep trying, keeping our heads down, trying to recover, and learning from what’s going wrong.”

He feels that it’s difficult to remain mentally strong during this period.

“A difficult question,” said Sainz.

“It’s certainly not ideal for a driver’s mentality and motivation to have so many problems. But if there’s one problem we’re not having, it’s a lack of speed. We have speed on most weekends.

“It’s still early in the adaptation period. The thing is, speed is useless if you then have problems in the key moments of the weekend, which is what’s happening to us.”