- Sainz logging more factory hours at Williams than ever before to help find gains in 2026.
- The FW48 arrived 20kg overweight. Grove’s manufacturing problems stretch back years.
- New chief engineer, a driven Spaniard, and a month before Miami to prove rebuild is real.
Williams arrived at the 2026 season with a clear ambition: to push into the top four of the constructors’ championship. They are nowhere near that. The FW48 is overweight, short on downforce, and the team sits near the foot of the standings.
Yet inside the Grove factory, something else is happening. Carlos Sainz is spending more time there than almost anyone outside the paddock knows, and that presence is becoming one of the more important parts of a rebuild that has no easy answers.
A difficult start to a new era
The trouble began for the Grove-based outfit before the season ever did. Williams missed the pre-season shakedown at Barcelona because the FW48 was not ready.
Then came the news that the car was carrying more than 20 kilograms of excess weight. For a team that had just finished fifth in the 2025 constructors’ standings, the drop was steep.
Sainz managed just two points from the three opening races. His ninth-place finish in China owed as much to seven other drivers failing to be classified as it did to pace.
Williams sits above only Cadillac and Aston Martin in the standings.
Sainz did not dress the situation up. “For sure, it’s been a shock, for me, for the team, for James, for Alex, for all the engineers,” he said via Crash.net.
He added that he had sensed the difficulty as early as December. That kind of frankness, from a driver who had taken two podiums in his first year at the team, tells you something about how sharp the fall has been.
Speaking during testing in Bahrain, Sainz also placed the team’s problems in a wider context. “It has been a very tough winter for the team,” he said.
“We thought we were on the right track,” he added. “But this winter has taught us that we are still far away, not just Williams, when you look at all the other six teams that are not the four top teams.”
He is not hiding from the facts. But he is also not treating Grove’s problems as unique.
The underlying problem plaguing Williams
Manufacturing has been one of Williams’ deepest wounds for years. The 2019 Barcelona pre-season test is perhaps the clearest example in recent memory.
The team could not get their car to the circuit on time. That failure was not a one-off. It pointed to something structural, and it contributed directly to the exit of Paddy Lowe, who had arrived to modernise the operation.
When James Vowles took over in January 2023, what he found was sobering. As SoyMotor reported, the team was using a single Excel spreadsheet with around 20,000 cells to manage its parts and build process.
That detail has since become a quiet way of measuring the scale of what Vowles inherited.
At the Australian Grand Prix that year, the team could not put Logan Sargeant back in the car after an incident because they had no spare chassis available. The sport’s standards had moved on. Williams, in some critical areas, had not.
Vowles has spoken plainly about what the team still lacks. “What we’re missing is a few things,” he said.
“One, there is still some infrastructure that we’ve absolutely got to get up to the right level. Two, there is also a little bit of a lack of knowledge of what current absolute benchmark excellence in F1 looks like, and we have to educate ourselves in that regard.”
Knowing the problem and fixing it are not the same thing. The 2026 season has shown exactly how wide that gap remains.
Carlos Sainz’s role inside the factory
This week, Williams confirmed the appointment of Dan Milner as Chief Engineer for Vehicle Technology.
Milner brings two decades of experience linked to Mercedes and its predecessors, including Brawn and Honda. He was part of the engineering structure during eight consecutive constructors’ championships.
His hiring is not a response to a crisis. It is a deliberate step in a longer plan. Within that plan, Sainz’s role reaches well beyond what happens on a Sunday afternoon.
According to SoyMotor, the Spaniard has been visiting the Grove factory regularly throughout the season, spending considerably more time there than a driver would usually be expected to.
He has not been asked to do this. It is a habit he chose to build.
Vowles noticed it early. “The great thing about Carlos is that he has an incredible work ethic,” he said.
“He works every minute of the day. Even when we finished the race between Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, he called me on Monday, he called me on Tuesday, he was in meetings with me on Wednesday.”
Sainz has spoken about what pulled him toward the project in the first place. He found people at Williams who are genuinely proud of where they work, and he believes that matters.
“If you’re proud of the place you work at, that’s going to bring performance,” he said. “People are passionate and incredibly driven to bring this team back to the front.”
When results are scarce, as they have been through the early part of 2026, a team can quietly lose its sense of purpose. Sainz’s regular presence at Grove is one of the things working against that.
No shortcuts for Williams
The clearest thread running through Williams’ 2026 is a refusal to look for quick fixes. The Milner appointment fits that pattern.
So does the way Vowles has spoken about the kind of driver he needed around him during the rebuild. “I needed a leader, not just someone who is quick in the car,” Vowles said, reflecting on his pursuit of Sainz.
“If you look at every team he’s gone to, look at where they started and where they finished. You’ll see he has a history of ending in a much better place in the team than when he started.”
That record is now being tested in the hardest conditions Sainz has faced outside of Ferrari. The car is slow, the points are scarce, and the gap to the front is significant.
But the picture that comes from within Grove is of a driver who is invested in the long view, not just the short one.
Williams plan to use the extended break before the Miami Grand Prix to attack the weight problem on the FW48. Carlos Sainz has spoken about the urgency he feels around that push.
“We will do a big push over that month to come up with something for Miami that is a good step forward,” he said. How much that step actually delivers will depend on how deep the structural work runs.
But the foundation, a driver embedded in the daily life of the team and fresh engineering leadership that has built a winning organisation before, is in place.
Williams has been here before, at the bottom looking up. What feels different this time is that the person most invested in the climb seems to be the one driving the car.
