Racing
© Lukas Raich
Carlos Sainz said Williams’ long-run pace was “very, very far” off the midfield after Friday at the Spanish Grand Prix, with hot, windy conditions in Barcelona exposing what he called the car’s “main key weaknesses.”
Sainz ended the day 14th, five places ahead of team-mate Alex Albon and four tenths outside the top 10, but he made clear the bigger problem was not single-lap speed. Williams was still “more or less” in the Q1-Q2 fight over one lap, he said, before its performance fell away badly on race-style runs.
“It was one of the toughest Fridays I can remember,” Sainz said in comments reported after practice. “Leave aside the reliability issues, we were struggling a lot for pace, and this track is exposing the main key weaknesses of this car.”
That gap between qualifying trim and race trim was the striking part of Williams’ Friday. Sainz said the team was roughly three to four tenths away from Q3 pace on short runs, “more or less where we expected to be,” but that “when we start degging, we are one second off the midfield” on long runs. He compared the situation to Williams’ more difficult weekends in China, Suzuka and Australia, adding that it was “quite a shock to all of us.”
He said the issue was magnified by tyre degradation in the heat. While all teams were suffering on Friday, Sainz believed Williams had it worse. “I think everyone is suffering, us double, so it is exponentially more serious for us,” he said. He explained that the car was sliding more than its rivals, building too much temperature in the rear tyres and compromising race pace, while the circuit also exposed the car’s excess weight.
The wider Williams picture did not help. An electrical problem prevented rookie Luke Browning from taking Albon’s planned FP1 session, costing the team useful running, and Albon finished only 19th in FP2 on a difficult afternoon. Sporting director Sven Smeets called it “a very messy day” and said the remaining work was “particularly on high fuel loads and with tyre degradation.”
For Sainz, that made Barcelona a warning as much as a bad Friday. After a run of cooler, slower-speed tracks, he said Williams had been brought “back to reality” as soon as it returned to a hotter, higher-speed circuit. He described the day as “a wake-up call” and said the team’s overnight focus had to be on understanding a long-run weakness that could leave it badly exposed in a race likely to be shaped by heavy tyre wear and multiple stops.