"Probably even further back than we thought": Sainz left frustrated after home race

Carlos Sainz left Barcelona without a single championship point on Sunday, finishing 12th at the 2026 Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix in what he described as a "very frustrating weekend" and a "huge lesson learned" for the Williams team.

Credit: Formula One

The result stung particularly hard given the setting. The Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya is as close to home as Formula One gets before the debut of the Madrid Grand Prix, and the Spanish crowd made their presence felt all weekend. Sainz had their full backing. He just did not have the car beneath him to do anything with it.

Starting from sixteenth on the grid — having been eliminated in Q2 on Saturday, more than three seconds off George Russell's pole time — Williams opted to run Sainz on the soft tyre compound at the start while teammate Alexander Albon took the more popular medium.

The gamble gave Sainz an immediate return, moving him up to thirteenth through the opening lap as others struggled to get off the line cleanly. But the track soon exposed Williams' limitations. Isack Hadjar, having dropped back off the start, quickly powered through the field to push Sainz back to fourteenth, and from there, the points zone looked a long way away.

The pit stop phase brought further shuffling, with Sainz making multiple stops and trading positions with the Audi and Haas runners through the second half of the race. Two virtual safety car periods complicated his afternoon further, with rival teams using the slowdowns to their advantage.

A late stop onto medium tyres at least gave him the pace to pass Gabriel Bortoleto on track, and three retirements across the field promoted him to twelfth by the flag. It was the maximum Williams had available on the day.

"I had a very good start, really good race pace, good tyre management, did everything I could today," Sainz said after the race. "But unfortunately P12 is everything we have in a track like this, so I'm not very happy with that."

The admission that followed was the more significant one. "We just realised that we are probably even further back from where we thought and where we expected to be," he said, "so yeah, a lot of work to be done in the next few races to cut the gap back in these kind of tracks."

Team Principal James Vowles acknowledged the same reality, noting that there was potentially one additional position available had conditions broken differently, but that the result broadly reflected where the car sits.

Downforce deficit and car weight are the twin problems Sainz identified — Barcelona, with its long, fast corners and heavy aerodynamic demands, punishes exactly those weaknesses.

Austria in two weeks offers the prospect of better territory, and Sainz admitted as much. But he was careful not to let that soften the bigger picture.

"That's only a very short relief," he said. "Just track dependent, that we might be a bit more competitive there. I think as a team we need to realise that we want to be competitive in tracks like Barcelona, and for that we need to bring quite a bit of weight down to the car but also a lot of downforce, which is the main thing that we are lacking around here."

A pointless weekend in front of the home fans. Williams will return to Madrid later this season. Sainz will be hoping, by then, for a very different story.