James Vowles is determined to keep Carlos Sainz at Williams but accepts it likely to be 2028 before they could give the Spaniard a race-winning car.
Sainz’s capture was a major coup ahead of last season, after he was left without a seat following Lewis Hamilton’s arrival at Ferrari.
His debut campaign with the Grove-based team ended with two podiums – in Azerbaijan and Qatar – to raise hopes that the team could battle at the top end of the grid.
But 2026 has been difficult. They missed the first pre-season test, putting them on the back foot, while the car being overweight has hampered Williams throughout the first nine rounds of the championship – with eighth for Alex Albon their best result.
Sainz is out of contract at the end of the season and said ahead of last weekend that he wanted to put thoughts of his future on hold until after the summer break in three weeks’ time.
“Carlos and Alex are the two drivers I want in this car. Full stop. No other debate about it,” Vowles told the Press Association.
Sainz is a four-time race winner with Ferrari. Vowles, who joined Williams as team principal in 2023, knows how important that winning mindset is.
“That’s why I made sure he was here,” he added.
“Because what often happens, the way I would describe a lot of problems we have in a lot of businesses is we have hard workers. But if you don’t know what great looks like, you’re not striving towards great.
“There’s an expression I really love, which is you can continuously improve a candle, but you won’t get a flashlight to light it. So sometimes you need to actually know what a flashlight looks like to go, ‘I’m going to stop doing this and we’re going better’.
“And Carlos is able to bring that. It’s not friction, not hitting each other against the head and going, ‘I’m not moving, you’re not moving’.
“It’s ‘I need to be here, can we get there? I can get there, but here’s the time period for it. Can you deal with that time period’?
“The timescale is… we’ll be in the position to be able to win grands prix by 2028 and the position to be fighting for the championship by 2030.”
Williams intend to deliver a radical change with a new chassis at the Azerbaijan race in September.
Vowles admits this season has been a challenge but remains excited by the task of trying to lead the illustrious Williams team – nine-time constructors’ champions – back to the top of Formula One.
“I have zero regrets from day one of joining,” Vowles said. “The surprise has been probably just how much there is to do and then how much we keep uncovering.
“There’s no lack of enjoyment. It’s fatiguing, there’s no doubt about it. But you’re motivated by… I can’t think of many jobs in the world where you’re given the ability to make this amount of positive change very quickly.”
Many hoped the sport’s drastic new regulations for 2026 would shake up the established order but instead the ‘big four’ – McLaren, Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull – have pulled even further away.
Vowles believes the sport may need to look at the way it is run in order to help promote close racing throughout the field.
“What we actually more need to think about is why is there a gap and what do we need to do to be able to complete that?” he added.
“It might be an amount of finance or regulation that helps us run right. But let’s do that because we want a sport where we can all be fighting for the right region.”
