Carlos Sainz reveals Williams’ FW47 shortcoming as Ferrari comparison made

Carlos Sainz has revealed where he feels the biggest difference in performance is between his current Williams car relative to his previous Ferraris.

With Ferrari taking pole position in Hungary, Carlos Sainz’s switch away from the Scuderia to join Williams for this year has given him some good insight into where the FW47 is lagging behind his previous cars.

Carlos Sainz: Williams needs a big design philosophy change

Sainz was one of the star performers of the F1 2024 season, despite racing somewhat under a cloud throughout the year as Ferrari confirmed in the pre-season that Sainz would be dropped from its driver line-up in favour of the arrival of Lewis Hamilton.

Sainz spent most of the year assessing his options for this season, eventually putting pen to paper on a deal with Williams to race alongside Alex Albon.

But it hasn’t been a particularly smooth year for Sainz so far, scoring 16 points to Albon’s 54, further highlighting the apparent difficulties in switching teams and adjusting to a car’s individual idiosyncrasies, as most drivers switching teams seem to encounter under the current ground-effect regulations.

The unique foibles of the car have meant a steep learning curve for Sainz, who said earlier in the year that he expected it to be months before he felt fully at ease behind the wheel of the FW47.

In Hungary, Sainz had the legs on Albon to out-qualify the British-Thai racer and come home ahead of his teammate, highlighting that this process is continuing, but the Spaniard’s main takeaway from the weekend was in just how different the Williams felt compared to the Ferrari he’d driven the year before.

Assessing the differences in how the power units, ie. Ferrari and Mercedes, compared, Sainz said that they are “completely different”, underlining what Hamilton has also said since making a swap in the opposite direction.

“The way you use the gears, the downshifts, how it goes into engine braking… the transition from the brake migration to the engine braking is different, and you have to change your driving style, for sure,” Sainz said.

With former Ferrari teammate Charles Leclerc delivering pole position on Saturday in Hungary, Sainz’s 13th-place grid slot meant that he could offer his team some insight into where the FW47 is lacking.

“Obviously I’m coming from the team that was on pole, then going back to a team that was P13 yesterday with me, and I could give them very strong feedback on why this car is lagging around a track like this,” he said.

“For this year, we cannot do anything but, for the future, hopefully it’s a very big learning curve for the team to know how we need to develop the car to be successful and competitive.

“We have relatively poor aero characteristics in long corners, where you need to hold the downforce from entry to mid corner. We struggle with these kinds of things. It’s been a trend for a very long time.

“That’s why long straights and sharp, short corners are good for the team. But the moment we get into long combined corners like at Barcelona, Hungary, Qatar, the car really struggles, but it needs a very big philosophy change and design philosophy change for the future.

“We’re trying to understand where and what to change to make sure the next year’s car is a bit more of an all-rounder and gives us a better platform to work at multiple tracks.”

Despite, on paper, Sainz having a difficult year, the Spaniard says he’s satisfied with how he, Albon, and the team have found alignment in how they wish to develop together for the new regulations incoming for 2026 – regulations that team boss James Vowles has focused Williams’ efforts on to prepare for over recent years.

“I think it’s been a very strong start to our time together in terms of the way we want to develop the team, the car, the interaction with Alex, with James, we are honestly all very aligned and very optimistic moving forward,” Sainz said.

“The problem is we are stuck in the middle of a year where we cannot actually develop a car that has clear weaknesses – some very good strengths, but also some very good weaknesses.

“So it’s not like we can exploit the feedback of the two drivers and the intentions that we have to develop this car what we need, because we are not putting it in the wind tunnel to develop so that’s where next year is going to be a lot more challenging for the team and for ourselves to see if we can actually improve the main weaknesses of this car. That is clear.”

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Williams occupies fifth in the Constructors’ Championship, with Vowles recently revealing that he is not willing to give up any development time for F1 2026 by being tempted back into further developing the FW47 to ensure holding onto that position.

Williams has steadily moved forward in recent years under Vowles’ stewardship, with the Grove-based squad moving off the very back of the grid to bring itself into contention for the title of best-of-the-rest behind the usual top four teams.

But Vowles denied that he feels he’s turned the team around from its calamitous years of strife at the back of the grid, although he said he feels things are “generally moving in the right way”.

For Sainz, aware that, without developments, headline results are unlikely to come his way over the remaining 10 races of F1 2025, he is focusing on improving the execution of a race weekend and finding some consistency to finish off his first year with Grove.

“From my side, in the short term, I’ll just focus on weekend executions. There’s nothing really we can do to the aero or to the setup of the car,” he said after Hungary.

“In the end, I tried three or four different setups a weekend to try and find extra around tracks like this [Hungary].

“I ended up reverting to the car that gave me the very competitive qualifying in Miami, Imola, and the beginning of the season, when I was very strong in quali, and it gave me, honestly, it gave me a very strong quali yesterday for the car that we have this weekend.

“The problem is, I think we’ve got a bit outdeveloped a bit into a track where it’s very difficult for us.

“So, in the second half of the season, probably I will just seek consistency with the setup, consistency with the car, and just make sure we execute clean weekends. This one was a clean weekend.

“Unfortunately, it came at the worst possible track for us to have a clean weekend.

“But, if we had had a clean weekend like this at Spa, Miami, and Imola, we would have scored a lot of points.”

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