James Vowles said his “mind was blown” by how quickly Carlos Sainz adapted to Williams Racing machinery.
Williams head into the 2025 campaign armed with their strongest driver line-up for many years. Alex Albon is now an established Formula 1 star having impressed since his return to the grid in 2022, while he is now joined, for the first time, by a driver with more experience.
Sainz has become something of an F1 journeyman having raced for Toro Rosso, Renault, McLaren and Ferrari. After his spell with the Scuderia, which yielded the first four race victories of his career, he has moved back down the grid pecking order to join the Williams project after his previous seat was given to Lewis Hamilton.
On a personal level, the 30-year-old is determined to get back to racing at the front as quickly as he can. And for Williams, his experience and skill will be invaluable as team principal Vowles bids to awaken the sport’s sleeping giants.
Sainz has now spent a whole pre-season working with his new colleagues and had up to 12 hours of track time with his new racing machine in Bahrain testing last month. But he had already impressed long before that, when he took part in the post-season test with his new employer in Abu Dhabi last December.
That first outing in the 2024 car was enough to get Vowles even more excited about his new signing. “First of all, in Abu Dhabi, the rate he got up to speed was mind-blowing to me. It was really just a handful of laps before he was second on the timesheets, and he held it there all day,” he told TalkSPORT.
“His feedback is more concise than I expected, really brilliant. He’s very good at distilling information in a way that you can understand concisely, and then find in the data later as well. He has the ability with just a few words to bring our team to absolute celebration.”
Vowles is taking a patient approach to his Williams project. The long-term aim is to get a team with a rich history but which hasn’t won an F1 title since 1997 back to fighting at the sharp end of the grid, and their leader sees the 2026 regulation changes as an ideal opportunity to make significant progress on that front.
But it may be the case that they have already taken a notable leap forward. Their car for the 2025 season, the FW47, looked impressive in testing and, while on-track programmes and fuel loads of their competitors were not clear, they set the headline time with Sainz going quicker than anyone else over the course of the three-day test.
Regardless of the unknown factors around their performance in Bahrain, Williams are being widely tipped to impress this year. While challenging the top four teams will be a stretch, it could be the case that the Grove-based outfit might be regular contenders for top-10 finishes this term.
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