F1 News: Sainz Jr. calls for change as Williams crawls to finish

(GMM) Carlos Sainz Jr. (pictured) has added his voice to calls for urgent changes to the 2026 regulations after enduring one of the most miserable race weekends of his career with a Williams team that arrived in Melbourne overweight, unreliable and woefully short of downforce.

The Spaniard, who joined Williams in 2025 with progress as his one non-negotiable demand, missed qualifying entirely after an ERS failure wiped out his practice running.

“It’s been a disastrous weekend in that respect because I couldn’t do any laps in FP2, I practically couldn’t get out in FP3, and now I’m not qualifying,” he had told DAZN at the time.

“All the problems we didn’t have in Bahrain are surfacing now.”

Carlos Sainz Jr. of Spain and Williams prepares to drive in the garage (Photo by Alexis Perrin/Atlassian Williams F1 Team)

In the race, he was lapped twice on merit. A front wing reliability issue that had been present since Bahrain cost him most of what little learning he could do.

“I had to do 30 laps at a snail’s pace with no downforce at the front,” he said. “Then we stopped and changed the front wing to see if I could do 8 laps to learn something about the car on soft tires. I’m way behind in learning these new regulations because I’ve missed so many sessions.”

He was blunt about where Williams stands. “The car isn’t there, it’s not ready to fight for points. We have many reliability issues, we’re overweight, we don’t have enough downforce.

“We need to improve in every area.”

He put the gap to Mercedes in qualifying at over two seconds and said the deficit to the midfield pack behind the top four also needs urgent attention.

Sainz had been one of the more measured voices on the new regulations in the build-up to Melbourne, gently pushing back at critics like Max Verstappen.

After Sunday, he changed his tune entirely.

“The feeling is bad,” he said when asked how it felt to race the new generation of cars for the first time. “The start was dangerous with many cars having problems, and on the first lap, with the active aerodynamics and the slipstream, it was very dangerous.

“Safety always has to come first, and it wasn’t the safest first lap.”

As GPDA director, he went further than most on the fundamental issue.

“This sport is called Formula 1. The formula they thought was good for Formula 1 isn’t the right one and it needs to be changed. The 50-50 split for F1 races doesn’t seem to be working. Nobody seems happy about it.”