Sainz warns Williams FW48 needs more than upgrades

Carlos Sainz says Williams is much farther from its 2026 target than expected after Barcelona exposed a fundamental FW48 weakness in medium- and high-speed corners, leaving him to warn that planned upgrades alone will not be enough without faster gains in downforce and weight reduction.

Speaking after the Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix, Sainz said it was "time to go back to the drawing board" because the car lacks pace on the kind of layout that best reveals its underlying performance. He called Barcelona "a very good circuit to measure car performance" and said Williams was "1.6 to 1.9 seconds behind the front-runners, and also 0.6 to 0.7 seconds behind the top of the midfield." For Sainz, that deficit showed how far the team remains from where it expected to be.

The Williams driver said the problem is not isolated to one weekend. He linked Barcelona directly to the same pattern seen at Suzuka, explaining that circuits loaded with medium- and high-speed corners expose the FW48 most severely. "We came to a circuit with a lot of mid- and high-speed corners, and we have major problems on tracks like that," Sainz said. He added that at Suzuka Williams was "far behind the midfield" and "almost half a lap behind."

That is why Sainz's concern goes beyond the usual update cycle. "I know what is being put in, and this team’s upgrades usually work well," he said. "But I don’t know if it’s enough to close the gap we currently have at a circuit like Barcelona." He then made the point more bluntly: "We have to do more than what we’re doing now."

Sainz said the priorities are clear. "Every week, for the team, it is super-important to find points of downforce, or kilos of weight," he said, while stressing that everyone at Williams is already pushing hard. Even so, he warned that improving at the normal rate may not be enough when rivals are progressing at the same time, saying that even when Williams brings updates, it needs to "essentially double" that effort.

The scale of the challenge is reflected in Williams' start to the season. After seven races, the team sits eighth in the Constructors' standings, with its best result an eighth place at Monaco. Sainz and team-mate Alex Albon have both tied that slow start to a car that arrived late, remained above its ideal weight and has not developed as planned.

The warning matters immediately because Sainz does not expect the track-specific problem to disappear soon. He said Austria should be "a bit better," but only as limited relief rather than a sign of a fix. "If every time we go back to circuits like this we suffer in the same way, then it’s ultimately just about being dependent on the track characteristics," he said. He expects a tougher test to follow, predicting that "Silverstone will be even tougher," with Spa and Hungary also likely to expose the same weakness unless Williams can quickly add downforce and take weight out of the FW48.