Carlos Sainz Dragged Williams Back To The Podium

Formula 1 is a zero-sum game. With only 20 spots on the grid, 10 spots in the points, and three spots on the podium, anyone's rise is necessarily accompanied by another's fall. Likewise, on the level of an individual race, only razor-thin margins separate a rise from a fall. That's why not every podium this season has been held down by the trio of championship leader Oscar Piastri, his McLaren teammate and primary challenger Lando Norris, and the always lurking Max Verstappen. Mistakes are made, Nico Hulkenberg drives out of his mind, or the best cars fail to perform on any given Sunday.

To me, the best kinds of races this season are ones where it's not just a procession whose only drama comes from whatever strategic shenanigans McLaren conjures up. The 2025 Azerbaijan Grand Prix was this kind of race, thanks in part to a chaotic qualifying session and also to a big mistake from Piastri. At the end of the day, there was a hell of a surprise on the third step of the podium, as Carlos Sainz brought home Williams's first podium since 2021, and its first "real" one since 2017.

In his first year for Williams, having moved over to make room for Lewis Hamilton at Ferrari over the off-season, Sainz has been merely fine. Williams has a decent car, though not one that was ever going to challenge for the top spots on the grid, and the Spaniard, who just turned 31 earlier this month, took some time to get accustomed to his new digs. His results this season have been similarly fine. He retired in two of the first four races, and picked up a Did Not Start in Austria, but otherwise, he's put the Williams in the bottom third of the points about as often as he's finished outside of them entirely. He's been thoroughly bested by his teammate and Williams mainstay Alex Albon, who entered the race in Baku with a 10-5-1 head-to-head lead (Albon did have three straight retirements in Spain, Canada, and Austria; the latter weekend was just a nightmare for the Oxfordshire team). If I were a betting man, before qualifying on Saturday I would have put Albon's chances of a shock podium much higher than Sainz's.

But that's why I don't bet. Albon had a nightmare on Saturday, crashing out of qualifying in the first phase, the first of a record six red flags in a mess of a session across the grid. (He also picked up a 10-second penalty during the race and finished 13th.) Thanks to some rain and high winds combining with the high speeds and tight corners at the Baku street track, the drivers were all over the road and into the walls in qualifying. The red flags were caused by Albon, Hulkenberg, Pierre Gasly, Oliver Bearman, Charles Leclerc, and Piastri.

This left Sainz to pick up the pieces, and the Smooth Operator was smooth throughout, reaching Q3 and, for a lengthy segment of that start-and-stop phase, even holding onto pole position, with hopes of rain fueling dreams of starting in the top spot. Ultimately, there was enough clear weather and track for Verstappen to eventually grab pole on his final lap of Q3, but Sainz still managed to lock up P2 and a front row start, his best qualification of the season by far (previous high: sixth). While a win or even a podium might have seem far-fetched, Williams has performed well this season on the faster tracks on the calendar, and something like a P5 was very achievable once the McLarens and likely one or two others cleared him.

About that: Piastri had his worst weekend of the season in Baku. His red flag set him up with a ninth-place start, and a first-lap crash on turn five ended his race completely.

The championship leader was all out of sorts, or as much as the typically cool and collected Piastri can get. That opened the door not just for Norris to catch up on points, but for someone else to climb onto the podium. As for Norris, the Q3 mess left him without a good lap, particularly after he brushed the wall on his last attempt, so he started seventh on the grid, and a slow reaction off a safety-car restart—caused by Piastri's crash—let Leclerc pass him early on. Norris did eventually get up to fourth, but a terrible pit stop from McLaren pushed him back down behind Leclerc. It was then a battle not for the win or even a podium for the Brit, but rather for seventh place, a spot he did eventually win but could not surpass. (The Ferraris finished eighth and ninth.)

With all that in mind, Sainz's task was big but straightforward: run a steady race and hope the pace of the Williams, particularly in the many high-speed straights in Baku, could keep him towards the very top. Which is pretty much what happened. Sainz held onto second place for most of the race, miles behind Verstappen but comfortably on the second step. That was until lap 40, when Mercedes's George Russell, battling a flu all weekend, pitted from second and came out just ahead of Sainz, who had pitted 12 laps earlier, but came out behind Hamilton and was not able to close the gap to Russell before the latter's pit stop kept him ahead.

That's how the race would end at the top, with Verstappen winning by 14.6 seconds and completing his sixth career grand slam (pole position, leading every lap, fastest lap, and the win) and then Russell and Sainz filling out the podium. (I have to take a second here to say what everyone dreads: Watch out for Verstappen, whose win combined with McLaren's no-good weekend put him just 69 points behind Piastri. That's still a nice lead, but a couple more disasters like in Baku could see this two-horse title race turn into a three-car melee.) Given his demotion on the grid to Williams, and the struggles of the season to date, it's understandable that Sainz was elated with the podium, immediately calling it the best of his career and his first "smooth operation" at Williams:

If that's not enough to sell how big this was for driver and team, look at him go for the customary team dive:

As previously mentioned, this is Williams's first podium since Russell accomplished the feat at the 2021 Belgian Grand Prix. Keen rememberers of F1 lore will note that the 2021 Belgian Grand Prix was an absolute joke of a race, a rain-disrupted calamity that was called during the third lap. Russell was one of the beneficiaries of that call, but it's hard to say Williams truly earned that podium the way Sainz did on Sunday. You'd have to go back to 2017 and Lance Stroll, of all people, to find the last full-length podium for Williams, when Stroll navigated safety cars and red flags at this same Baku track to finish third. Eight years of emotion, struggle, financial hardship, the Nicholas Latifi of it all, and the sale of the historic team outside of the Williams family—all those things directly and indirectly led to Sainz's return to the podium, his 28th in F1.

Sunday's podium will almost certainly be Williams's best result for the season. It's similarly certain that the conditions that led to Sainz leaping into his team will not replicate in the remaining seven races. This is doubly true since most of the remaining tracks do not play as directly into the Williams car's strengths; only Las Vegas can be considered a truly fast track.

But who cares about the future? In the present, Sainz and Williams have accomplished something that even their most diehard fans couldn't have seen coming as the grid descended on Baku, and though there was certainly a combination of luck and mistakes that made this possible, Sainz kept his cool and converted a smooth qualifying into a smoother race, and now, even if just for one race, Williams is back on the podium.