Why long Sainz courtship was only one factor in eventual Williams union

“One of the top four drivers, if not at times the number two driver on the grid.” 

While you might have to tip your head to one side and gently stroke your chin while parsing the somewhat curious phrasing of this sentence, you can see what Williams team principal James Vowles is getting at, why he views the signing of Carlos Sainz as such a significant step for his team – and why he remains surprised none of the leading outfits beat him to Carlos’s signature. 

And while Sainz himself might, like any self-respecting racing driver, cavil at this definition of his status oscillating between points four and two without ever hitting the peak, it’s not inaccurate.  

Sainz arrived in F1 at the same time – 2015 – and in the same team, as Max Verstappen, although they were at different points in their single-seater journey. The Spaniard had five years’ experience to the Dutchman’s one and was the Formula Renault 3.5 champion, while Verstappen had been runner-up to Esteban Ocon in European F3.

Neverthless, Team Max had the upper hand politically in what was then known as Scuderia Toro Rosso: Red Bull’s ‘motorsport advisor’ Helmut Marko had long been convinced Verstappen was the standout talent of his generation and Verstappen’s father Jos had played
Red Bull, Mercedes and Ferrari off against
each other exquisitely to get him under contract.

On track Sainz and Verstappen were quite evenly matched; the former had a slight edge in qualifying, the latter in the races, although Sainz’s DNF’s have skewed perceptions of their time together
very much in Verstappen’s favour. After a 
year-and-a-quarter, their paths diverged as Verstappen was elevated to the senior squad and Sainz remained parked at Toro Rosso. 

Sainz was evenly matched with Verstappen in their rookie year as team-mates in 2015, but it was the Dutchman whose trajectory sky-rocketed while Sainz had to bide his time

Photo by: Alastair Staley / Motorsport Images

Via Renault and McLaren, Sainz went to Ferrari where he has won three grands prix and beaten his highly rated team-mate Charles Leclerc in the drivers’ standings once. There’s no doubt that over a single lap, Leclerc is one of the fastest drivers in the business, but it’s difficult to define the margins between him and Sainz because of the oscillating nature of Ferrari’s technical development.

Its 2023 car was difficult to drive and the team’s attempts to dial out its cantankerousness while retaining speed tended to favour whichever of the two drivers could handle its characteristics on a given weekend. Nevertheless, at the end of the season, Ferrari chose to put Leclerc on a long-term contract and then sign Lewis Hamilton for 2025, dumping Carlos onto the job market. 

So perhaps not the first or even second choice for a top team, but surely his track record would tempt one of them? Surprisingly not – but the reasons for Red Bull and Mercedes not signing Sainz, despite having potential vacancies earlier this year, are more nuanced.

Shout to the top 

Even before the new deals for Leclerc and Hamilton were announced, Vowles had opened a dialogue with Sainz. They met first at last year’s season-closing Abu Dhabi GP.

Vowles is repositioning Williams as a team with top-tier ambitions rather than one that’s merely happy to make up the numbers and earn an easy living

As befits a former engineer best known for his long stint in charge of Mercedes’ race strategy, Vowles is accustomed to juggling probabilities over a long time frame. “Direction of travel” is a phrase he frequently deploys and it aptly sums up his approach to deal-making: a long courtship rather than take-it-or-leave-it. Last season several months elapsed between his first approach to Pat Fry, then Alpine’s technical director, and Fry deciding to become Williams’ chief technical officer. 

Equally, you might say Williams is a harder sell to a competitive driver or engineer than a top-tier team, given its recent back-of-the-grid history and the substantial challenges that lie ahead. But in tying up these high-profile recruitments Vowles is repositioning Williams as a team with top-tier ambitions rather than one that’s merely happy to make up the numbers and earn an easy living in the mid-grid under F1’s more equitable post-Ecclestone commercial terms.

As Fry himself said last year – at the same race weekend the dance with Sainz began – he left Alpine because “I didn’t feel there was the enthusiasm or the drive to move forward beyond fourth [in the constructors’ championship]… I want to be pushing things forward, I don’t just want to sit there and not be able to do things.” 

Vowles has long been impressed by Sainz and began discussions with him before the Spaniard's Ferrari exit was announced

Photo by: Williams

When Vowles spoke for the first time after announcing Sainz’s imminent move to Williams, he followed this theme: “If you’re going to go for an individual who’s going to make the difference, I’m not just focused on how quick he is in the car. I’m focused on how he is as a personality.

“This also includes how his entourage is, which includes his manager [his cousin, Carlos Onoro], and his father – his father is as performance-driven as Junior, he’s an incredible character. The three of them come together as a package, and that’s what we need here in Williams.

“Look at every team he has been in. They’ve improved significantly – and I get why. After spending the past nine months talking to him
at least weekly, what I’ve realised is that he’s
a performance machine. 

“He will do everything in his power to transform himself and the team around him. 
And that’s powerful. That’s worth more than
what he can drive the car at. Why wouldn’t
you want that in your stable?” 

Williams only had one driver with the capacity to score points for much of the past two years, until the decision was taken to replace Logan Sargeant with enterprising rookie Franco Colapinto after Zandvoort. Having one of Sainz’s calibre in the other garage potentially takes the ‘direction of travel’ into a virtuous circle: it energises personnel who have floundered ineffectually at the back of the field; and outside the garage makes Williams a more credible destination for high-calibre tech personnel
and commercial partners. 

Stairway to heaven 

Completing the deal still required a long journey from that first encounter in Abu Dhabi, where for the sake of secrecy the Sainz entourage had to sneak in the Williams motorhome via the tradesmen’s entrance and go up the back stairway to Vowles’ office. It was never a given that Sainz would take up the offer, despite the subsequent shock of being shown the door at Ferrari. 

Both sides had more proverbial irons in the fire, though it’s clear that for Williams keeping the struggling Sargeant was far down the options list. Vowles has likened the process of watching the various driver-market permutations develop to a game of chess. As Sainz held out for openings at Red Bull and Mercedes, Audi and Alpine also entered the frame.  

Sainz was at the centre of the driver market intrigue, and his eventual signing to Williams means Sargeant's replacement Colapinto will have to look for a seat elsewhere

Photo by: Mark Sutton

While Mercedes had a clear vacancy, it became clear early on that Merc boss Toto Wolff’s ‘Plan A’ was to promote Andrea Kimi Antonelli from F2 – although Wolff briefly entertained the notion of him having a ‘learning year’ at Williams. That possibility was solid enough for Vowles to support an easing of the superlicence restrictions. 

The Red Bull scenario was more nuanced. At the time a power struggle was playing out involving the new bosses of the parent company, the Yoovidhya family which has a majority shareholding in Red Bull, team principal Christian Horner, Helmut Marko and the Verstappens.

Against a tapestry of intrigue involving Horner’s personal life, and threats that Max might trigger an exit clause if Marko were to be fired, Horner began to make positive noises about Sainz’s possibility to return to the Red Bull fold. And even as the ‘Maxcit’ scenario became less plausible, Sergio Perez’s wavering performances suggested a vacancy in the number-two garage might be in the offing. 

"The message that it was 2025 and 2026 and beyond didn’t come from us. It came from Carlos"
James Vowles

But this required Sainz to balance his desire for a competitive car against the potential for rekindled aggro with Team Verstappen. It’s known that on more than one occasion in the Toro Rosso days, Jos lobbied for Max to have more optimal run plans in practice and qualifying and got the go-ahead from Marko, overruling team principal Franz Tost in the process. That was a decade ago and the Verstappens have only grown more powerful since. Adrian Newey’s imminent departure and Red Bull’s faltering
form added to the demerit column. 

Famously, in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the titular prince identifies something rotten in the state of Denmark and then spends the majority of the play procrastinating over what to do about it. Likewise, Sainz drove the other drivers on the market – Vowles too, probably – to distraction by vacillating for the first half of the season. While Marko spoke of Sainz having “a very lucrative offer from Audi that we can’t match or beat”, there was no urge to put pen to paper. 

That, it turns out, was because of the ongoing dialogue with Williams, via late-night phone calls and clandestine hotel meetings, along with a late bid from Alpine once Flavio Briatore slipped his tasselled loafers under a desk at Enstone. For Sainz and his entourage this presented a tough set of choices to unpick.

Alpine remains stuck in beta; Audi-owned Sauber has failed to recruit or add performance to its car this year, and its most senior managers have been locked in a fruitless civil war; and Williams is struggling to achieve lift-off from
the back end of the grid since its car has come  in overweight, a legacy of having to focus resources on changing outdated production-management methods.

Vowles hid nothing from Sainz when discussing the future of Williams

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

“From the beginning, I gave him warts-and-all ‘Here’s what’s going to happen,’” says Vowles. “We are going to go backwards. Here’s why. Here’s what we’re investing in. Here’s what’s coming. Here’s why I'm excited by this project, and it’s your choice if you want to be a part of it. 

“And he’s been pretty consistent in his messaging back, which is here is all the positives of all these other entities that you can’t see because you wear a Williams shirt. And my job back in return is to say here are the positives of Williams and here’s the difference. I’ve never changed on what those positives are.” 

Where Williams scores at a high level is
that its direction of travel – that phrase again – towards recovery is further advanced than
Alpine or Audi. It has an engaged owner,
Dorilton Capital, which doesn’t want to ‘flip’ the team for a quick profit, has made the right key recruitments to take the team forwards, and doesn’t interfere in the day-to-day running.

Alpine and Audi have both recently hit the reset button, in Alpine’s case not for the first time. Hence Sainz has committed to at least two seasons – and wanted the news out there. 

“The message that it was 2025 and 2026 and beyond didn’t come from us,” says Vowles.
“It came from Carlos. He wanted it to be abundantly clear that he’s committed and
this is where he wanted to be.”

Will Williams become the long term home Sainz has been searching for?

Photo by: Ferrari