Looking at Carlos Sainz’s second Williams podium, Lewis Hamilton can only be envious. In the second half of the season, the Spanish racer shows his successor how to deal with a new team. He got to know his car so well that he proposed an experiment at the Qatar Grand Prix, which was successful.
Carlos Sainz can be proud of the fact that during his time in the stable, the whole team improves in terms of results — in other words, when he leaves the team, he is always in better shape than when he arrived. He succeeds repeatedly and the Qatar Grand Prix shows that it will not be a fluke. Williams owes the big improvement to his understanding of the car.
You surely still remember Williams’ huge trouble at the Hungarian Grand Prix, when Sainz and Albon took only fourteenth and fifteenth place, although they collected points before and after the weekend at the Hungaroring. The circuit in Qatar is similar in character to the track in Budapest, so the British team expected big problems at the penultimate event of the season.
Carlos Sainz therefore, he rolled up his sleeves and came up with such settings with the team that celebrated success. “Yes, I’ve been pushing for it since Budapest. We had a very bad weekend on this type of circuit, so we said we’ll use this year to learn and try something in Qatar, because theoretically we should have struggled here, it should have been a very difficult weekend.”
“So we put together a plan and tested it. I had a couple of ideas that I wanted to try on the simulator. The team came up with other ideas, so we put them together, we tested the car on the simulator and we believed we would have a better base to start with,” he explained the work procedure. “Well, it worked straight away. So we learned valuable lessons and our confidence was boosted, because it’s important for the stable to do tests like this, and it’s important that they work.”
These words were spoken by Carlos Sainz before the race, which turned out even better than the rest of the weekend. Ahead of the season, perhaps nobody expected Sainz to get two race podiums, while Lewis Hamilton would experience the first year without a podium in his career.
“It’s hard to explain, because before the weekend we expected to struggle, to be far behind the top ten. We were competitive again, and from the start of the weekend. The sprint was a bit more difficult in that eighth place, because we were destroying the tires too much.” he let go Carlos Sainz until Sunday’s assessment.
Everything worked out for Williams. “We tweaked a few things in the single-seater setup that brought the car to life before qualifying and the race. It allowed us to maintain a much better race pace than we expected before the start. After a great start, I got up to fifth place and I was thinking, we’re really fast, we’re fighting the cars around us. We didn’t just fight them, we beat some of them and got on the podium.”
This is great news ahead of the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, as well as sealing fifth place in the Constructors’ Championship. “I am extremely proud of the whole team and our progress. At the beginning of the year, we were fast, but we made too many mistakes. When you are in your first year with a team, it is normal that it takes you a while to put things together, but today everything was perfect: start, strategies, stops, execution of rides, tire management, communication. We managed everything as a unit with an asterisk.”
“It’s all down to the progression of how the team and I started to understand things. In my first year, we got two race podiums and one sprint podium. We’re riding at a really high level for it being the first year,” he concluded enthusiastically Sainz.
