Carlos Sainz has never been shy about telling it straight, and this time the honesty stings. Williams, he admits, is no longer in the same conversation as Aston Martin. Not close. Not nearly. The team he once called a project worth believing in is now, by his own admission, only better than a Cadillac squad that hasn’t scored a single point all season.
That is not a throwaway line. That is a driver looking at the timing screens and concluding his own team has been lapped in the development race by a rival.
From Rivals to a Different League
The context is simple enough. Aston Martin arrived at the 2026 season with arguably the slowest car in the field, then transformed itself with a Hungary upgrade and a new Honda engine unveiled at Zandvoort. What matters now is what it means for everyone left behind, and nobody is feeling that more than Williams.
Fernando Alonso finished ninth at the Dutch Grand Prix to collect two points, a result that would have been unthinkable for Aston Martin a few months ago. Sainz, meanwhile, trailed home 16th after a clash with Alex Albon that forced his teammate out of the race. Two very different weekends, and Sainz was blunt about what separates them now.
“We are pretty much where we expected, which is towards the back. We are only quicker than Cadillac at the moment. You saw the Astons in race pace, they are a different league right now. So we couldn’t fight them. We couldn’t fight anyone, really.” – Carlos Sainz
That is about as damning a self-assessment as you will hear from a driver who only recently signed a new deal to stay put. There is no spin in it, no attempt to soften the blow for the sponsors. Just a flat admission that Williams has gone from beating Aston Martin to not being able to live with them at all.
Five Races of Nothing New
What makes the comment sting further is that Sainz insists this is not a one-off bad weekend. He pointed to a longer pattern, one that suggests Williams’s slide has become the new normal rather than a blip.
“If you look at the last five races, this is where we’ve been for the last five races. It is where we are. We’ve had a very tough weekend on my side with some consistency of the parts, which haven’t allowed me to set up the car correctly for the race.” – Carlos Sainz
Sainz described his season more broadly as a “perfect storm” of problems, as RacingNews365 reported, with the FW48 arriving late to testing, missing its Barcelona shakedown, and turning out overweight and short of downforce. Combine a car that is late, heavy and slow with the sort of part inconsistency he mentioned at Zandvoort, and it is little wonder Williams has dropped from fifth in the constructors’ standings a year ago to ninth now, on just 11 points.
Williams Looks Down, Not Up
There is something almost poetic about where Williams now sits in the pecking order. This is a team that produced genuine podiums last season, the first “normal” race podiums for the outfit since Lance Stroll’s effort back in 2017. Now Sainz is measuring progress not against midfield rivals above them, but against whether they can stay clear of a Cadillac team that has yet to register a single point in its debut campaign.
Williams sits ninth in the constructors’ championship on 11 points, five behind eighth-placed Audi and eight clear of Aston Martin. On paper that gap to Aston still exists. In race pace, according to the man actually driving the car, it no longer means anything.
Monza Hope, Tempered Expectations
Williams will point to Monza next week as a potential reset. It has traditionally suited the team’s low-downforce characteristics, and Albon at least sounded a note of cautious optimism.
“It’s always a good track for us. Low downforce, not much combined cornering, so that tends to suit our car. We’ve got the best power unit on the grid, so it should help us. But I’m not expecting points.” – Alex Albon
Notice the qualifier at the end. Even the driver talking up Monza as a good venue is not backing his own team to actually score there. That tells you plenty about where confidence levels are at Grove right now, whatever the circuit characteristics suggest on paper.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Sainz signed his new contract because he believes in the project, and to his credit he has said as much publicly and repeatedly. But belief and results are different currencies, and right now Williams is spending the former while collecting almost none of the latter. When your own driver ranks you above only the one team that has scored nothing all year, that is not a talking point for the marketing department. It is a diagnosis.
The Italian Grand Prix arrives at Monza next week, with first practice starting at 10:30 UTC on Friday 4 September, check the calendar for your local time. Whether Williams’s low-downforce hopes translate into anything meaningful remains to be seen. What is already clear is that the team Sainz once measured himself against has pulled away, and he is not pretending otherwise.
