Williams’ Carlos Sainz has attributed his impressive P6 result in the 2025 F1 Miami GP qualifying to his improved experience with the car over the course of the season.
A disappointing start to the weekend saw Sainz start P15 for Saturday’s sprint race, where he suffered a sudden puncture, causing him to drop out of the race.
However, his confidence was reinstated during qualifying later on, where he managed to clinch P6 in a ‘best-of-the-rest’ performance behind Red Bull, McLaren and Mercedes contenders.
Frustration in F1 Miami GP sprint
Speaking after qualifying, Sainz expressed his dissatisfaction with his F1 Miami GP sprint race performance, lamenting the lack of opportunity to show his true pace:
“It never fully makes up for it because I still curse what we’d been doing up until the quali today with the potential that you see we had,” he said.
He attributed his disappointing performance to a number of mistakes made by himself and the team during both Sprint qualifying and the following race. A deleted lap time after locking up at turn 11 saw Sainz knocked out in SQ2, despite teammate Alex Albon having the pace to make it to the top ten.
Then, during the Sprint race proper, Williams made a blunder by starting Sainz on full wet tyres, while conditions pointed towards intermediates – which every other driver had opted for. The team took advantage of a red flag due to poor visibility to swap his wets for intermediates, but a sudden puncture forced the Spanish driver to retire the car in the middle of the race as he hit the wall at turn 13.
“Honestly FP1 felt really good and then Sprint quali we did an operational mistake, then I did a driving mistake, then in the sprint [race] we did another operational mistake, then I did another driving mistake, so really really scrappy up until now, and [I’m] very frustrated knowing the pace I had,” he said.
“But in quali we managed to press the reset button, which is not easy in a sprint weekend, and we managed to put things together and do the best quali of the year so far.”
Refreshed mindset for qualifying
Williams recorded its best qualifying performance of the season so far at the F1 Miami GP, with drivers Sainz and Albon clinching P6 and P7 respectively. Despite his grievances about the disappointing start to the weekend, Sainz attributed this positive performance to a switch in his mentality:
“I kept spiralling, thinking about all the things that we’ve been doing wrong, but then I went with my engineers and said ‘look, let’s just reset, we have the potential. I’m going to take a 20-minute nap and come back with a different mentality because clearly this weekend has not been good, and let’s give it a go in the sprint’.
“In the quali, we know we have the potential and we did a really clean quali, really well executed, and to nail that last lap of Q3 always feels great. Up until now that lap of Q3 is by far my most clean, putting together everything and nailing a good lap for Williams.”
Sainz: The more laps I do, the more experience I get
Sainz’s qualifying performances seemed slow to get going at the start of the season, with the Spaniard struggling to make it past Q2 for the opening three races. However, there have been significant changes, and Sainz has been a familiar face in Q3 since Bahrain. When asked about what had changed, he attributed his consistency in pace to time spent in the car:
“Just experience. Experience with the car. I was pushing in the wrong places when coming into Q3 and you saw it yesterday, I still sometimes push in the wrong places with this car. I sometimes like a bit of feedback from a couple of things in the car that I would like to have a bit more feedback from,” he said.
“The more laps I do on soft tyres and light car, light fuel, the more experience I get and the more I know what the car is going to do as the car progresses through quali. It’s something you cannot explain in words, it’s super technical, it’s super feeling-biassed, but that’s why it takes a few races to adapt to a car and a team, and I think, to be in race six doing these Q3 laps is really good news for me because it means that we’re, step-by-step, going in the right direction.”
Sainz: FIA made the right decision with regard to safety
Saturday’s sprint race was slightly delayed due to heavy rainfall, causing severe issues with spray and visibility on track. Being close to the back of the grid, Sainz was more affected by this than others:
“For safety, the FIA took the right decision because in P15 I couldn’t see a thing on the first [lap], even if I was on extremes, gambling a bit.
“I couldn’t see a thing, and racing in those conditions, you’re leaving it down to luck, whether there’s a crash on the straight and you T-bone someone, we know those are the nastiest crashes we’ve seen in single-seaters and it can cost a very bad injury to a driver.”
Safety is naturally a real concern in severe weather conditions like the ones we saw on Saturday in Miami. The sprint race wasn’t completely without incident; Charles Leclerc was out of the race before it even began, crashing on his way to the grid.
Sainz praised the FIA for their decision to delay the start of the race:
“The fact that the FIA took it relatively easily, especially on a straight that is cornering, as you saw with Charles [Leclerc]’s incident, and the visibility is very poor on these straights where you’re surrounded by walls, plus the spray, I think that was the right call.”
Williams expecting positive result from rainy race
With rainy conditions expected for the race on Sunday, similar procedures could be taken to ensure the safety of the drivers. Still, Sainz is optimistic about Williams’ chances for a good result:
“We all want to go racing. I think tomorrow, if the conditions are the same, I expect the FIA to have the same approach. You see, even if you delay half an hour then we had a clean race and nothing happened, so let’s play in the same way.
“We were competitive in the wet also so even if it rains I hope that we can put together a solid one.”
