How Sainz's F1 Qatar GP podium illustrated Williams' progress from near-oblivion

Williams had been rescued from circling the Formula 1 drain just five years ago.

It had been fighting against the tide for years, as the Williams family was strongarmed into the position of having to fill its threadbare coffers with dowries from well-backed drivers: Lance Stroll, Sergey Sirotkin, Robert Kubica, and Nicholas Latifi all brought financial incentives – as did George Russell, who came bundled with a Mercedes discount. Artem Markelov might have been another, had his dad not been shown the jailhouse door by Vladimir Putin...

How the tide has turned in that half-decade.

Carlos Sainz’s third-place finish in Qatar has cemented Williams’ fifth place in the 2025 constructors’ championship; the team enters the Abu Dhabi finale with 137 points, 120 points up on its 2024 tally of 17. An oft-repeated fact in the aftermath of the weekend was that Sainz has two podiums across 2025, while his Ferrari replacement Lewis Hamilton has failed to finish a grand prix in the top three all year.

While Dorilton Capital’s purchase of Williams had rescued the team from financial dire straits in 2020, investment remained aimless for a couple of years. Jost Capito’s installation as CEO and team principal had brought an uptick in results over 2021, but he was not a dyed-in-the-wool F1 type; no doubt that the German is a fantastic manager of racing teams, but Williams needed someone with contemporary, top-end knowledge of how to rebuild a team beset by decades of underfunding.

James Vowles offered that, having accrued a mental blueprint of just what was required to operate at the top end of the grid through his years at Mercedes. The investment had some direction, and plenty was needed to overhaul the aging facilities at Grove. References to machinery worthy of a feature on Antiques Roadshow might have been a touch dramatised, but it nonetheless exposed the lack of investment placed upon some of the more critical areas of the team.

Let’s be honest, the roll-out of new infrastructure and the phase-out of Williams’ car-build tracker localised in Excel might not capture the imagination quite as much as aero innovations or other radical designs, but building foundations are seldom as interesting as picking out a new kitchen from the Ikea catalogue.

Last year, in terms of performance, was a backwards step over 2023. The FW45 had been a fantastic car in high-speed circuits, but generally lacking everywhere else; the FW46 follow-up was designed to be a bit more of an all-rounder, but had also been an in-house test case for some of the new design processes.

Williams' 2024 car was effectively a test bed for the team's new in-house processes

Photo by: Andrew Ferraro / Motorsport Images

Vowles remarked that it was built “without contingency” and without cannibalising any parts from the previous year’s car. As such, it was around 10kg overweight as the designers struggled to meet deadlines and had to force through compromises.

As such, last year’s car was effectively a means to stress-test some of the weaker points in Williams’ arsenal. The team had to do the groundwork, and the car that emerged from it was highly wind sensitive and with a weak rear end – it was small wonder that, while Alex Albon and Franco Colapinto had impressive moments, they were just as inclined to hurl the thing into the scenery.

That brings us to the FW47. Vowles had stated earlier this season that there were no fanciful innovations to the 2025 car, but rather the result of a car being done ‘right’. There’s still plenty of room for the team to grow as the infrastructure continues to be improved, but the current 120-point increase is owed to the donkey-work done in producing last year’s car. And, crucially, it didn’t start the season 10kg overweight unlike last year’s machine...

"We put together a plan with the team to try some different things in the simulator [...] right from the get-go in practice, the car was a lot better than expected" Carlos Sainz

What remains impressive is that Sainz has been able to claim two late-season podiums despite Williams’ decision to kill off its 2025 development early. It made some sense in Baku, as this year’s car has retained some of the DNA of its forebears – straightline speed was clearly not a recessive gene in the family tree. But the team had not been entirely confident about Qatar; Sainz revealed a long time ago that the car struggles to retain grip through long-radius ‘combined’ corners, and the Losail circuit consists almost exclusively of that corner type.

That prompted Williams to experiment and, per Sainz, took genuine risks with its set-up to try to pull something out of the Qatar weekend. It was in a position of luxury, in that fifth was almost sewn up – but furthermore, 2025 has always carried a throwaway aura to Williams’ management. There were no real consequences to going all-out with its sim work.

“It's mainly due to the hard work I think everyone's done trying to prepare this race after the very difficult weekend we had in Budapest, which is kind of this long, medium-speed combined corners that we always seem to be very, very weak,” Sainz elaborated.

Sainz called Williams' Qatar set-up experimental - and it ultimately led to a podium

Photo by: Noushad Thekkayil / NurPhoto via Getty Images

“We put together a plan with the team to try some different things in the simulator and in the factory to try and switch on the car for these kinds of track. To be honest, right from the get-go in practice, the car was a lot better than expected, a lot more competitive.

“And then we did another couple of changes going into the main quali and the main race after our learnings from the sprint that really switched on the car, especially in the race pace.

“[On Saturday] we struggled a lot with front deg. [In the grand prix] the car felt a lot better, and we went from seeing [Andrea Kimi] Antonelli checking out in the sprint and giving us 10 seconds, to all of a sudden today having a chance to keep him behind, race him, and even with the strategy of the McLarens also keep Lando [Norris] behind.”

Let's compare that to last year: both Williams drivers were out in Q1, Colapinto clashed with Esteban Ocon at the start, and Albon finished a lap down in 15th. While Albon hadn't enjoyed the rub of the green in Losail this time around either, his 11th-place finish was at least on the cusp of points - although starting on the hard tyre made life more difficult across the remainder of the race

Since the season’s been so long, it’s easy to forget how impressive Albon’s campaign has been – after all, form is temporary and class is permanent.

But this was said of Sainz’s season amid his early struggles on joining Williams; most suspected that it was only a matter of time before the grand prix winner started firing on all cylinders. He just needed to become fully ensconced within the team and develop a pit-to-car symbiosis with his engineers. You’d have to say that he’s almost there.

Sainz endured struggle in the early part of 2025 as he adapted to Williams - but the growing pains have largely subsided

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

The Spaniard’s recent form also demonstrates why Vowles tried so hard to get Sainz through the door. Although Sainz had flirtations with Sauber/Audi and Alpine over 2024, having wisely chosen to take his time once it became clear his spell at Ferrari was over, Williams didn’t want anyone else. No wonder Vowles likened it to dating – Williams went through the motions of talking to other drivers but, like an old romantic, it pined for the driver it truly wanted.

While Sainz might have been a little wary of the perceived step down, and moving from the constructors’ runner-up to that year’s ninth-placed team will have certainly felt like one, the first year has yielded a pay-off.

Vowles’ long-termist aspirations have never been about 2025 – and perhaps not even 2026 either. Yet, if 2025 can demonstrate a huge surge in performance while simply focusing on getting the basics right, imagine where Williams can be once it feels more confident to innovate.