Racing
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Carlos Sainz said he expects to start deciding his Formula 1 future during the summer break, with Williams’ disappointing 2026 campaign forcing him to reassess how long the team’s project still fits his plan.
Sainz said he does not have a firm deadline, but the shutdown will be the point when he sits down with Williams team principal James Vowles and the wider team to judge where things stand. “I cannot give you a date, but I imagine, as I always said, that I was going to wait until the summer to sit down with my team and think about this,” Sainz told media including RacingNews365. He said he wants to discuss “the future of the team and my future in it.”
That conversation comes against a much tougher season than Williams expected when it targeted the 2026 rules reset as a chance to move forward. Instead, the team has reached the summer break ninth in the constructors’ standings with 11 points after finishing fifth in 2025, while Sainz has scored only six points. He said that was “neither part of my plans nor my expectations.”
The scale of the setback has become central to Sainz’s thinking. He said the FW48 has carried “weight issues and other shortcomings” through the year, and described 2026 as a season that has pushed his own timeline back “by one or two years.” He added that the real impact depends on recovery speed: “It depends on how quickly we manage to recover from this situation.”
Alexander Albon, Sainz’s Williams teammate, delivered an even bleaker verdict before the break. Albon said “it definitely feels as if we’ve been pushed back by two or three years” after Williams switched focus early to its 2026 car and still missed the Barcelona winter shakedown because of development delays. He said the regulation change exposed bottlenecks inside the team, leaving Williams still trying to recover the ground it lost over the winter.
For Sainz, that matters because he arrived from Ferrari with a clear limit in mind on how long he was prepared to wait for Williams to return to the front. He said he had a timeframe in mind for helping the team get back on the path to success and for how long he was willing to wait “until we are fighting for wins again.”
He has not closed the door on staying. Sainz said the team now has “a pretty good understanding” of what went wrong and insisted he still believes in the longer-term direction at Grove. “I have to reorient my thinking to imagine where I will be in three to four years and make a decision,” he said. “But I am still convinced of the path and the project we are working on.”
That leaves Williams facing a critical stretch. The team that sold Sainz on its revival now has to convince him that 2026 is a delay rather than a dead end, and that recovery can come quickly enough for him to remain part of it.