Carlos Sainz’s move from Ferrari to Williams marks a new chapter in his Formula 1 career, and the Spanish driver has revealed the “biggest change” he’s facing in adapting to his new team: the Mercedes power unit.
Having spent years with Ferrari, familiarizing himself with a different engine has been a significant adjustment.
Sainz first track experience with Williams took place at F1’s post-season test at Abu Dhabi last December, a productive outing followed by a TPC (Testing of Previous Cars) session in Barcelona and last week’s shakedown of his team’s new FW47 at Silverstone.
“I like blue, first of all – it’s an easier colour to combine with other things!” replied Sainz when asked earlier this week at the F1 75 Live event about his first weeks with Williams.
“Apart from that, yeah, that’s me [having raced for] 50 per cent of the teams in Formula 1 in 10 years. That’s a different team every two years, I don’t know if it’s a good or a bad thing!
“But it definitely has given me a lot of experience and a lot of information of how different teams work, [how] different organisations can work and different cultures.
“Definitely this is the biggest switch, from an Italian base back to a British-based team. It’s definitely going to be a big change but nothing that I’m not used to, nothing that I haven’t seen before.”
A Whole New Power Unit Experience
Reflecting on his initial laps with Williams at the end of last season at Yas Marina, Sainz admitted that his biggest adjustment was getting acquainted with the Mercedes engine for the first time in his career.
“Definitely the thing you feel the most when you change teams, the moment there’s a power unit involved, it’s the power unit,” Sainz said.
“The noises, the vibrations, the sound, everything just changes completely.
“So even if I went out on the pitch trying to understand the aerodynamics and the tyres and the feeling of the mechanical sides of the car, the only thing I could have to adapt for the first few laps was just how different a power unit can be.
“So yeah, that’s probably the biggest change.
“Also the way the power unit operates in terms of switches, especially nowadays in Formula 1 with so much going on on our steering wheels, with the deployment, the battery, things like this, procedures, safety procedures of the engine and the power unit, it’s all definitely the biggest change that I’m having to adapt so far in Williams.”
A Surprising First Impression
Sainz’s move from Ferrari, a race-winning team, to Williams, which finished ninth in the 2024 Constructors’ standings, represents a major shift in competitiveness.
However, his first experience behind the wheel of a Williams car was more positive than expected.
“Honestly speaking, I think first impressions are very important, because you only have one chance to make a first impression, and that was very positive,” Sainz said.
“Because at Williams, in Abu Dhabi, I found a car that was honestly a bit better than I thought, or better than I expected, obviously with some deficiencies compared to the cars that I’ve been driving, but not massively far off.”
A Gradual Adjustment Process to FW47
Nevertheless, Sainz acknowledged that adapting to the Grove-based outfit’s new-spec FW47 will take time, as limited testing opportunities slow down the adjustment process.
“Normally from my experience, that adaptation process – with only three days of [pre-season] testing, which is one and a half [days] per driver – my experience tells me it takes around half a year to really understand all the tricks and the little details on the car,” the four-time race winner said.
“If testing would exist [more], that process would be a lot shorter. There’s so many things that you need to go weekend by weekend learning and experiencing.
©Williams
“This doesn’t mean that you can’t be competitive – I believe that if you are good at adapting and you do a good winter with your team, you can be competitive straight away.
“But there’s always the last tenth or the last two tenths of the car that you learn as the year goes by and you start to work better with your engineers, better with the team, and you start instructing performance not only from your side of the car but also from everyone around you, all your engineers from different departments.
“You just try to start maximising everyone to your advantage. Again, it doesn’t mean that I cannot be competitive or we cannot be competitive straight away, but really, really extracting that last tenth of the car always takes a bit of time.”
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