Even a diverted flight home couldn’t take the smile off Carlos Sainz’s face late on Sunday night. Fresh from his first podium finish in a Williams Formula 1 car, his beaming grin appeared on Charles Leclerc’s Instagram stories past 11 p.m. as the former Ferrari teammates sped through the night in a rental van.
“We were diverted by a storm and couldn’t land in Nice,” Sainz explained to Leclerc’s camera phone as he negotiated the entry to a tunnel on a two-lane highway. “So we landed in the middle of Italy, rented a van and now we are on our way to Monaco.”
With Sainz behind the wheel, the pair joked about slashing their ETA by half an hour. Based on his performance on the streets of Baku earlier the same day, half an hour might have been somewhat conservative.
Sainz’s impressive third-place finish in Azerbaijan was the latest in a line of feel-good podium finishes in F1 this year, following on from Isack Hadjar finishing third at Zandvoort and Nico Hulkenberg’s third place at Silverstone. In a season in which Sainz’s results were falling mysteriously short of his pedigree as a four-time grand prix winner, the third-place finish helped set the record straight by nearly doubling his modest points haul to 31 for the 2025 season.
Although the Baku result may have been linked to underperformance by other drivers — not least McLaren title rivals Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri — it was also the result of a clean qualifying lap in tough conditions and a faultless race from start to finish. More importantly for Sainz, however, it answered those critics who may have started wondering if the 31-year-old had been in some way “found out” after moving down the grid from Ferrari to Williams this year.
Shortly after parking his car in the area reserved for podium finishes in parc ferme, he acknowledged his underwhelming results at Williams to date, but also the sweet vindication provided by his first podium with his new team.
“Unfortunately, with me, we’ve had a lot of bad luck, a lot of incidents — very difficult to convert all that pace into results,” Sainz said of his season. “But now I understand why it all happened, because the first podium needed to come like this. It’s just life, you know?
“Life just sometimes brings you those bad moments to give you a very nice one, and this stays much better than any other thing that I was expecting. So, just a life lesson, to keep believing, keep trusting yourself, your team around you, your procedures, everything that you’re doing — because sooner or later, it always pays off.”
But even with the 15 points awarded alongside his third-place trophy in Baku, Sainz has still scored less than half the points of teammate Alex Albon this season. Azerbaijan podium aside, Sainz’s highest finish in the opening 16 races of the season had been two eighth-place finishes in Saudi Arabia and Imola, with a combination of mistakes, collisions and penalties scuppered multiple points-paying opportunities elsewhere. Consistency and staying out of trouble had always been totems of Sainz’s reputation in F1, making the missed opportunities of 2025 all the more puzzling and frustrating.
The easy explanation is that Sainz had struggled to adapt to a new car after four years at Ferrari, but that ignored the performance potential he’d shown in qualifying sessions this year. The gap between Sainz and Albon over one lap has been one of the smallest between two teammates this year — and closer than the one between title rivals Norris and Piastri.
Prior to Albon hitting the wall in Q1 in Baku, which ultimately ruled him out of a chance to match Sainz’s heroics in Baku, the average gap between the two drivers in qualifying was just 0.061 seconds in Albon’s favour across 16 rounds. Such a small number dispels the myth that Sainz has struggled to learn how to drive this year’s Williams and instead underlines how scrappy his Sunday performances have been.
“I have actually been pretty fast all year with the car,” Sainz said on Sunday. “I think out of everyone that’s changed teams — which is not an easy task nowadays — I’ve been very competitive from the first race, very quick, but I didn’t have results with me. I didn’t have results to prove to myself, the team, and everyone that some good things were about to come. But, in the end, they did.
“I think life has taught me many times that this sometimes happens — that you have a run of misfortune or bad performances, but then suddenly life gives you back if you keep working hard with something really sweet like this.”
But the redemption arc sprouting from Sainz’s podium in Baku stretches beyond this year’s string of messy races. At the start of 2024, he was informed by Ferrari that his contract would not be renewed beyond the end of the season as the famous Italian team had secured the services of seven-time champion Lewis Hamilton for 2025.
On paper, Sainz had been a match for Leclerc during their time as teammates at Maranello, but that seemed to count for little when his future was tossed to the vagaries of the F1 driver market last year. Neither Mercedes nor Red Bull, two teams that both signed a new driver for 2025, made a bid for Sainz, meaning he was left talking to teams from F1’s midfield in the hope one could offer a longer-term route back to the top.
Opportunities were open with Sauber/Audi and Alpine for 2025, but Sainz was most convinced by the offer put on the table by Williams. A large part of his decision was based on the plan laid out by James Vowles, who was then in his second year as team principal and extoling the virtues of short-term pain for long-term gain. But even with someone competent like Vowles at the helm, committing his future to the team still required a substantial leap of faith from Sainz.
Despite its rich history of title success in the 1980s and 1990s, Williams hasn’t finished in the top half of the constructors’ championship for the past seven seasons. It last won a race at the 2012 Spanish Grand Prix, and prior to Baku, its last podium came at the washed-out 2021 Belgian Grand Prix, when a remarkable P2 qualifying performance by George Russell became a podium by default after the race consisted of a single lap behind safety car in torrential conditions. Before that, Williams’ last “normal” podium came via Lance Stroll at — funnily enough — the Azerbaijan Grand Prix in 2017.
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Leclerc gets a ride home with Sainz after plane diversion
Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz rent a van to get them back to Monaco after their flight was diverted after the Azerbaijan Grand Prix.
In his pitch to sign Sainz last year, Vowles earmarked the 2025 season as another difficult campaign in which the team would switch away from car development immediately to focus on the major regulation change coming in 2026. It made the remarkable result in Azerbaijan — one that was borne from genuine pace in difficult conditions — all the sweeter.
“This one means even more just because, obviously, a year ago when I put my bet on Williams, and I said I’m going to this team because I truly believe in this project, and I truly believe that this team is on the rise,” Sainz said. “I’m very comfortable in this working environment, also very comfortable with everyone around me.
“I always said to the team from the beginning that whenever a first big opportunity of fighting for a podium comes, as long as we have everything under control and nothing goes wrong and we prove to everyone what we’re doing, and we get that podium, then I’ll be OK. And it’s exactly what ended up happening today.
“We had our chance starting from P2,” Sainz continued. “Probably if you asked many of us yesterday, we didn’t believe the podium was actually achievable with so many fast cars behind us on the grid. But I think we’ve had good pace this year, we just didn’t have many opportunities to show it. Today we had a very good opportunity to show our very good pace, and we managed to stay on the podium.”
It’s a feeling mirrored by Vowles at the top of the team.
“I think a podium — and more importantly a podium where it’s not weather or safety car to put us there — would have been a dream for anyone in the team,” Vowles told Sirius XM on Sunday evening. “[Carlos] earned it today — well done to him. I think he has shown the world why he’s here and I think it ratifies his decision to be here as well.”
It was also not lost to many observers on Sunday that Sainz’s first podium for Williams came before Hamilton’s first podium for Ferrari. The odds of such an outcome at the start of the year were likely so long that bookmakers probably didn’t take bets, but apart from anything else it underlines the size of Sainz’s achievement after taking his leap of faith.
But when asked to comment on the Hamilton comparison during Sunday’s post-race press conference, Sainz was too classy to take the bait.
“What everyone else does is not my business, to be honest,” Sainz responded. “What I care about is that the first opportunity that I had to score a podium with Williams, and the first opportunity Williams had to score a podium, we took it, we scored it, and there it is.”
Instead, Sainz seems to have his thoughts planted firmly in the future having long let go of the past. “For me the vindication from the result is not so much about moving to Williams, because I always believed in this project,” he said. “I said it many times and I’ll say it again, this is my life project and if I manage to bring Williams back to being competitive and winning races, this is everything that I care about.
“I will put the next few years of my life, all my effort, doing that and committing to that.”
In a season in which his results have not matched his underlying performance, Sainz’s podium in Baku has gone some way to setting the record straight. The wait for the next top-three finish may be even longer, but the belief that it will happen has doubtless doubled since Sunday.
