Sainz warns Williams is one second off the pace even without its weight problem

Carlos Sainz has delivered a stark assessment of Williams’ 2026 campaign, warning that the FW48’s aerodynamic deficit is so severe that eliminating the car’s excess weight would not be enough to make the team genuinely competitive. Speaking after finishing 12th at the Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix — two places outside the points and two laps down on the race winner — Sainz said the team is falling well short of its own targets.

“I think if you get rid of the overweight, you put yourself in the fight for those points — but that’s not really enough,” Sainz said in his post-race Spanish-language media session. “The overweight might put you one second off the leaders, fighting with an Alpine. That’s not where we promised we’d be this year.”

The FW48 arrived for pre-season testing significantly overweight, a problem the team has acknowledged publicly. But Sainz’s comments suggest that is only part of the story. He reported gaps of between 1.6 and 1.9 seconds per lap to the frontrunners across different stages of the Barcelona race, pointing to a deeper aerodynamic shortfall.

“It’s not where we should be, considering all the wind-tunnel time we’ve had and all the development hours that have gone into this car,” he added. “Being one second per lap off the front is obviously not good, so we’re a long way from where we need to be.”

The reference to wind-tunnel time carries particular weight given Formula 1’s Aerodynamic Testing Regulations (ATR), which allocate development resources inversely to championship position. Williams, having finished fifth in the 2025 constructors’ standings — a result team principal James Vowles called a “new baseline” toward title contention — currently enjoys more development leeway than Mercedes, Ferrari, McLaren and Red Bull. Yet the team sits eighth in the 2026 standings, and the gap to those ahead is widening rather than closing.

The ATR system’s logic is visible elsewhere on the grid: Alpine, which finished last in 2025 and therefore holds the most generous development allocation of any established team, currently sits fifth in the standings. For Williams, that comparison only sharpens the concern — greater resource has not translated into performance, and Sainz is not expecting a rapid turnaround.