Carlos Sainz said he signed a Williams contract extension because it’s not in his nature to jump ship at the first sign of trouble, insisting he still has faith he can help turn the team into a Formula 1 winner.
Williams has had a nightmare start to F1’s new regulations and it sits ninth in the championship at the midway point.
Team boss James Vowles had convinced four-time race winner Sainz to join from Ferrari after the signing of Lewis Hamilton, outlining his vision to make the once-great Williams a force on the grid again.
Despite a dismal season so far, this week they confirmed Sainz and Alex Albon will remain for 2027.
Sainz said the poor start has not made him think any differently about Vowles’ vision and admits his two podium finishes in 2025 may have heightened expectations too much.
“[I re-signed] because I believe in the project,” Sainz said on Thursday. “I said that from the beginning. This [season so far] was a massive for sure blow to my expectations, especially after how well we did last year. I think last year didn’t help the fact that it also exceeded my expectations and probably lifted my expectations for this year.
“The reality is that this year has turned out to be the perfect storm of all the problems possible. We’ve come up with a car that is late, a car that is overweight and a car without downforce, which in Formula 1 terms is everything that you want to achieve in a car.
“We got the principles wrong. As a team, I want to make sure that it doesn’t happen again, but at the same time, I’m not going to leave in a project that I believe the driver is a fundamental part of, showing commitment to all the workers, all the 1,000 people behind the scenes. I didn’t want to leave anyone hanging and commit to the project.”
He said it’s not in his character to quit on the team.
“I think you guys know me by now,” he added. “I don’t think it’s part of my character to jump ships when the situation is also at its worst. I think I told everyone also how committed I am to this project two years ago, how excited I was about it, and the first time there is a bump on the road, a big bump, probably bigger than anyone could have imagined after the podiums of last year... I don’t think it’s part of my way of being, my character, to jump ships at the first possible opportunity.
“I think in the back of my head I wanted to always renew, but I was obviously worried, concerned that we need to make sure this doesn’t happen again. I obviously had to go back to everyone and understand where we are, where we’re planning to go, and how it has disaffected our plans.”
While Sainz was a relatively new arrival to the Williams project, Albon has been at Williams since 2022.
In Barcelona, he overtook Nigel Mansell for the most F1 starts for Williams, while July’s Hungarian Grand Prix was his 100th in team colours.
Unlike Sainz’s multiyear deal, Albon’s contract announcement only mentioned 2027.
Albon suggested he wants to see how things change over the next 18 months before he commits further.
“I want to see a reaction, I want to see what the team can deliver, I want to see a strong bounce back from this year,” Albon said when probed on why he didn’t sign a multiyear agreement.
“We talked about the performance of the car but there’s been a lot of areas as a team that we haven’t delivered on, whether it’s the quality of the car or clearly the weight, but missing testing, there’s a few things this year that we’ve let slip and I know [James Vowles] and everyone at the team are doing a huge effort to correct these issues, but it’s not just one single thing, this year it’s been quite a few things, so there’s still work that needs to be done.”
Albon added: “I would say I have one of the better ideas out of most people because I’ve been with the team for such a long amount of time and for me this year has been a bit more of the anomaly than the previous years.
“I think that this year I’ve been brought into a more deeper analysis of where it went wrong from last year to this year. So why were we late? Why was the car overweight? What were the reasons? Why did we miss the trick on even the philosophy of the car for example?
“And I think in my head I’m satisfied with what those reasons are, as simple as that really.
“At the same time I also want to see these things materialise and I want to see these changes happen to next year. It sounds frustrating to say but the best chance we have of that is to also sacrifice this year and focus on next year’s car and that’s possibly something which is frustrating behind the wheel, frustrating for all of us back at the factory.”
