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Now that you’ve had a full year to settle into the team, how different does it feel coming into 2026 with that foundation in place?
Carlos Sainz: Well, in many ways, a second season with the team will feel very different because I’ve met all the people that I had to meet. Obviously, there still are a lot of new faces coming in into the team over the last few months, but I will know mainly all the core people of my team, which will make things a lot better, a lot more streamlined to work with. At the same time, everything will be completely new all over again. It’s a completely new car, a completely new set of regulations, so all the experience that I gathered with the FW47 and how to drive it, how to be as fast as I could be at the end of the season with it, now it’s all down to zero. We have to gain all that the experience and knowledge all over again, so it’s very excited.
If we told you at the beginning of last year that you would achieve multiple podium finishes, how would you have felt? Did the results surpass all of your expectations?CS: I think so, obviously you always go into a new project with very high expectations, and my expectations were always high going into this project with Williams. If at the beginning of the year you would have told me we would have scored a couple of podiums, one sprint podium, but especially P5 in the Constructors Championship, drivers in the top ten of the drivers, I think that would have been a really good year. I think we had a very solid first year together and now we need to build from it.
This season marks the beginning of Formula 1’s new regulations. With such a big reset across the sport, how are you liking the challenge and what excites you most about adapting to this new generation of cars?CS: On one hand, I’m very excited now because it’s a completely new set of regulations, which means all the teams and all the drivers start from a clean sheet of paper where we want to maximize that opportunity to the best of our abilities. At the same time, I would have liked a couple more years with a standard set of regulations to keep on my adaptation and keep bringing my knowledge to Williams about everything I knew about the old set of regulations. It’s one of the main reasons why I moved to this team and why I chose Williams as my future project, because I trusted a lot in the trajectory that we were on in the project going into these new set of regulations. I’m hoping that we can do another good step in the right direction.
What are your personal targets for 2026, and what do you think the team can achieve in this first year of the new rules?CS: I think it is impossible to set certain targets at the beginning of this year because it’s so new, so different. I think it’s the largest, biggest set of regulation changes since 2014 or even a bigger one. To put an objective of where you’re going to finish in the championship, where you want to finish in the constructors, it’s almost an impossible task for me. Where I’m going to be looking for is how well the team is progressing in all the areas that we know we were still lacking and we are still weak. So for me, the fundamental thing is going to be to keep seeing progress from where we finished last year and to keep seeing a positive trend like we were seeing.
You and Alex enter your second season together as teammates, how has your working relationship evolved over the past year? And how do you push the team together to move forward?CS: The working relationship with Alex was always very good from the beginning, from this time last year it was already a very good, solid relationship where we already worked very hard through the winter together. One year after that we know each other very well. We know each other’s strengths and weaknesses, where I can help in certain areas, where he can help in other areas. Combining his experience with mine, but also our good, healthy working, competitive relationship. I think we can help Williams quite a bit this year, especially because I think experience is going to be quite important going into a new set of regulations.
One area where the team is definitely making huge progress is off track commercially. A number of new partners joining the team this year, just as they did last winter. What does it mean to have support from such brands who want to be part of this journey and push it forward?CS: I would like to welcome all our new partners and especially thank them, you know, for supporting Williams, supporting our trajectory. I think they’re going to be fundamental in the next few years in helping us transform this team into a championship winning team. And I’m sure with their help, we can do it all together. I’m very proud to be part of a team that so many important brands all around the world are now joining us and they want to be part of it. So welcome to them and let’s work together towards a better future.
