He’s a star in F1, but his star power could be much higher.
Carlos Sainz has had his opportunities, having gotten his Formula One start with Toro Rosso, racing opposite Max Verstappen. He had a stint at Renault before he started to come on at McLaren. He ultimately was pushed out by Daniel Ricciardo — a move that didn’t work out for any of the parties involved. But he started to find his groove with Ferrari from 2021-24.
But again, Sainz found himself on the outside looking in, with Lewis Hamilton, the seven-time world champion, opting to join the Scuderia after dominating at Mercedes. Losing out to star power, Sainz was out on his own, yet again.
In 2025, he landed at Williams, but it hasn’t exactly worked out for him as it had with his predecessor. He’s consistently been in the middle of the pack, racing alongside fellow former Red Bull protégé Alexander Albon. At the moment, Albon is getting the better of his Spanish teammate, with 46 points in eighth place. Sainz is languishing all the way back in 15th with 13 points.
So when asked on Thursday to self-evaluate ahead of the Belgian Grand Prix, Sainz couldn’t help but express his disappointment halfway through the season.
“It’s a difficult question to write in a report card, but I would say it’s been with some highs and lows,” Sainz said. “Extremely frustrating because I feel like I’ve had a lot of pace in the car. I’ve adapted to the team quickly right from the beginning. I felt with good speed in the car, but it’s been very difficult to put two results together through the whole first half of the season.
“When it was not a reliability issue, it was an incident with another rival. And when it’s not an incident with another rival, it was you don’t even get to start the race in Austria. Then it was a traffic in Q1, or then there’s just some strategic mistakes that we’ve done through the years.
“So nothing really has come together for us in terms of results. But in the middle of those up and downs, there’s speed. There is proof that we’re going in the right direction. It’s just when you don’t have a result to back it, that’s when it gets frustrating. So yeah, frustrating.”
Of course, F1 isn’t IndyCar — all the liveries differ wildly from each other. So, moving from team to team will have great differentiation.
The cars drive differently, perform differently, and handle differently. There’s an adaptation period moving from one team to the other, and for Sainz, he’s still adjusting to being in what’s currently a midfield car, albeit one that’s on the rise.
Sainz compared and contrasted his time with different constructors and what it takes to get more acclimated to a new team in terms of driving the actual car.
“Being back racing in the midfield has its challenges,” Sainz said. “I think I’ve been out of Q1 two or three times by 10 milliseconds. And you know exactly where those 10 milliseconds can be. And it changes your whole weekend because you don’t have a car to actually make it back through a field, like when you have a very competitive or a top-three, top-four car. If you’re out in Q1 or Q2, you can actually still make a difference on race day and make it back through a field. In the midfield, everyone has the same race pace as you. And it’s extremely difficult to actually recover unless you do something crazy.
“And then yeah, just the car obviously feels very different to a Ferrari. Very different limitations, very different driving style required, very different setup that I need to find to drive the car. But that, I feel like that side of things I’ve managed to adapt pretty quickly. And yeah, just maybe putting a bit of emphasis of how much lap time and how much results come from actually understanding yourself with your engineers, with your team, with all the strategy calls. How you communicate during the race? How do you come to the point of making the right call? Yeah, that needs a bit of bedding time to actually execute a good race weekend, both in quali and the race.”
Practice at Spa is set for one session on Friday before sprint race qualifying later in the day. The sprint and qualifying for the Belgian Grand Prix will take place on Saturday, with the race proper set for Sunday.
