It was a painfully slow start for Williams at the Circuit of The Americas as Carlos Sainz and Alex Albon struggled to keep their cars on track during practice for the United States Grand Prix in Austin. Carlos Sainz has admitted that Williams are not expecting any miracles after a disappointing opening day.
The Spanish driver finished 19th in FP1 and 20th in FP2, ending up more than 2.7 seconds behind Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc, who topped both sessions in the dry Texas heat. His Williams teammate Alex Albon faced even bigger problems, struggling to keep his car on the track and finishing bottom of the timesheets on the day.
Frustration was clearly on show as the pair battled away, with Sainz heard on the team radio admitting that his machine was a mess and that he had no confidence in it. Speaking to the media after FP2, Sainz gave an honest reflection of the team’s performance and what they are expecting from the remainder of the weekend's sessions.
“We know that we’re pretty much nowhere to be seen this year and we’re braced for a tough weekend,” Sainz said. “We’ll try to learn as much as possible which might give us some information for the future, but we’re not expecting any miracles going into the weekend.”
Asked whether the focus had already shifted to testing parts and strategies for 2027, Sainz agreed but was also adamant that Williams had an important task to achieve with this season’s car first. “More than parts for next year is mapping this year’s car properly,” he added. “We need to know why it is so bad. We’re going to understand what to do better for next year.”
That opinion was shared by Paul Williams, Chief Trackside Engineer for Williams. He supplied a deeper assessment into the difficulties both Sainz and Albon faced and explained what lessons the team can take away from Friday’s practice sessions.
“We spent most of today learning and looking at the future, so you saw a bit of a different programme for us in FP1. That was very much forward-focused, both for the remainder of this year, but really looking into next year,” Paul Williams said. “We've got to find that balance between performing here on this race weekend and the remaining races this season but also looking forward to the performance for next year's car. [COTA] is one of the easiest overtaking tracks, if not the easiest, so we'll be focusing more on high fuel long run performance and finding that correct balance between the low fuel qualifying pace and high fuel. That's really going to be our main focus and extracting that from the FP2 data.”
