Carlos Sainz sends strong Williams message as early adaptation continues

Carlos Sainz remains confident “I’ll get faster and faster” as he develops more experience at Williams, having tweaked his driving style and setup at Suzuka.

Sainz has been behind team-mate Alex Albon in every race and qualifying session so far in 2025, but has more experiments to try with his new team to find the best setup for himself.

Carlos Sainz: ‘The more laps I do with this car, I’ll just get faster and faster’

Sainz is adapting to life at Williams after four seasons at Ferrari, and in a continuation of a recurring theme throughout his career, he is taking some time to get used to his new surroundings before performance is likely to follow.

The 30-year-old qualified 12th for the Japanese Grand Prix, getting knocked out in Q2 three places behind Albon – albeit just half a tenth of a second behind his team-mate in that session.

With adjustments having been made at Williams as Sainz offers his feedback, he remains “relatively optimistic” about how his pace will develop with the car this season.

“We worked a bit on setup, making it a bit closer to where I wanted, and then I changed a couple of things on my driving style to make sure I don’t expose some of the car weaknesses that are quite evident when I push a bit further into quali,” Sainz explained after the race in Suzuka.

“I just committed to these two things, bit of setup, a bit of driving, and at least I think I was on Alex’s pace in quali and the race today.

How are the drivers matching up against each other in 2025?

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👉 F1 2025: Head-to-head race statistics between team-mates

“So let’s see if at other tracks I struggle a bit more or a bit less, and can be a bit more competitive, and then with the setup work that we can still do with this car.

“Then obviously, the more races and the more laps I do with this car, I’ll just get faster and faster. So, yeah, relatively optimistic moving forward.

“I think there’s still a lot of setup things to try, and we discovered after quali a few weaknesses of the car that we need to really try and address.

“Losing a lot of lap time in certain specific points of the track that are in line with my feeling that I feel in the car, so I think we have a bit of homework on that side.

“At the same time, the car was good enough for points, and if we start putting better weekends together, we will do it.

“Bahrain [is a] difficult track to test with the morning session and the night qualis, but we will keep doing steps.”