Williams did not expect to be competitive in Qatar but Carlos Sainz Jnr said an “experimental” set-up helped both cars qualify in the top 10.
Teams’ 2024 performance in context
Williams was the slowest team at the Qatar Grand Prix 12 months ago. Both its drivers dropped out in Q1, Alexander Albon starting the grand prix from 16th place, Franco Colapinto 19th.
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Although Williams was on average only the ninth-fastest team last year, their performance at the Losail International Circuit was conspicuously worse than the other teams. In contrast Sauber, the slowest team last year, had one of their best weekends of the season and took their only points finish of the year.
Teams’ progress vs 2024
Sainz therefore had good reason to expect Williams would not be competitive this weekend. Speaking before practice he said Losail’s medium-to-high speed corners tended to highlight the FW47’s weakness.
“It’s 150-to-200kph, medium-speed, high-speed corners – fourth, fifth, sixth gear,” he explained. “Every track we go to, we see the GPS data and we tend to be one of the slowest cars or one of the slowest teams. And in Qatar, you only have those corners.”
He said the team would need “something magical in terms of set-up” to perform better this year. But perhaps Sainz knew they had something up their sleeve.
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In qualifying for the sprint race two teams lapped slower than last year and most of the rest were quicker – Red Bull by a mere thousandth of a second, Aston Martin by 0.758s. But Williams’s gain was over a second greater than that.
Sainz put his car on the fourth row of the grid for the sprint race with a lap of 1’20.542 – 1.8s faster than the team managed this year. “We were much quicker than expected this weekend, right from the off in FP1,” he said afterwards.
“I’m quite encouraged to see the car performing at a good level this weekend. We expected to be almost out in Q1, we actually [had] both cars in [S]Q3 for the first time in a while. So I’m encouraged by that.”
However the car exhibited its usual trait of being less competitive on softer rubber. “We’re much quicker on the mediums than on softs,” said Sainz. “Like always with our car, we seem to be better with the harder compounds.
“In FP1, on the hard tyre, I was nearly P1. Then on mediums in Q2 I’m top five and then when you put the softs on in Q3 the others seem to find more lap time than we did. And in the end P8, only half a tenth off P5, so we know there’s half a tenth there to find for tomorrow that could give us a much better track position for the race.”
Sainz confirmed the team had unlocked the performance by taking an unusual approach to its set-up.
“We’ve gone a bit experimental with set-up this weekend and we’ve decided to run a car that we would never run or we haven’t run pretty much all year,” he explained. “And it’s just adapted to this style of corner and it seems like the car is working.
“So I’m glad that the team keeps experimenting, we keep pushing. Also for me as a learning point of view, when I push a team to try radically different set-ups or some big differences, I feel like I learn a lot from the car and the team and the way the team and the car responds. This weekend so far is a positive experiment in that sense.”
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Gaps between team mates
The sprint race qualifying session was also notable as it was the first time all year Max Verstappen was out-qualified by a team mate. Yuki Tsunoda pipped him by just nine thousandths of a second. Verstappen was last beaten by a team mate in qualifying for the Azerbaijan Grand Prix last year, when Sergio Perez came out ahead.
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2025 Qatar Grand Prix
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