Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs Williams driver Carlos Sainz has acknowledged the tough challenges that come with switching Formula One teams after his debut race with the outfit ended in a crash into the barriers.Moving to a new F1 team means adapting to a different car, new personnel, unfamiliar processes, and equipment. But most importantly, understanding how the car behaves on various tire compounds under varying conditions is something that only comes with time.Sainz’s crash in his first race with Williams following his move from Ferrari is a classic example of how a driver was put under tricky conditions in an F1 car he was new to.
Carlos Sainz of Spain driving the (55) Williams FW47 Mercedes crashes during the F1 Grand Prix of Australia at Albert Park Grand Prix Circuit on March 16, 2025 in Melbourne, Australia.
Carlos Sainz of Spain driving the (55) Williams FW47 Mercedes crashes during the F1 Grand Prix of Australia at Albert Park Grand Prix Circuit on March 16, 2025 in Melbourne, Australia.
Rudy Carezzevoli/Getty Images
Despite the crash in Australia on the opening lap, Sainz stressed that he wasn’t being too hard on himself and admitted that he must overcome a learning curve to be fully competitive and comfortable in his new team. Speaking to the media in Shanghai ahead of the Chinese Grand Prix this weekend, he was asked about the challenges of switching teams. He said:”Yeah, but it’s at the same time, you cannot be too, too hard on yourself, because it just takes time and it takes examples like this in order to learn from this kind of situations and how am I going to test that situation in Bahrain?”You’re never gonna on a wet track, with a cold intermediate tire, in safety car mode. How are you going to put yourself in this kind of situation in Bahrain and learn from this and say, hey, there’s something here that I don’t quite like with the shifts and it could cut me out in Australia? And in this case it’s exactly what happened. But how could I have prevented that in reality when you look back on it?”There’s very little you can do to actually experience these things and you just need to give yourself a margin of races, you know, where you know you’re gonna go through this very steep learning curve and these kind of things can happen where you can be sure that you’re gonna learn a lot and give yourself a bit of margin and not to be maybe so tough on yourself because you’re gonna go through a big learning process.”Revealing the reason for his crash in Melbourne, Williams team principal James Vowles explained that a part throttle upshift in the safety car mode caused the power and throttle to re-engage in a slightly aggressive manner on his FW47 F1 car, which didn’t go well with cold tires on a wet track. He said in a video on X:”He was coming through the last corner. He was in second gear. He held a fairly constant throttle position, actually a tiny bit lower, a percent or two lower, and pulled for an upshift into third gear. So, it’s a part throttle upshift.”When he did so, and what happens inside those conditions is, A, we’re in a different mode. It’s a safety car mode. That runs the systems in a very different way to if we’re in flat out.And B, what happens is, obviously, as you imagine, we have a disengagement of power and torque, and then a re-engagement of power and torque. Now, there was a tiny bit more than would have been expected. I think, for me, it was accumulation of conditions.”
