Carlos Sainz Jnr has revealed his two-time World Rally champion father wanted him to join a different Formula 1 team this year.
After learning he would lose his seat at Ferrari this year, Sainz spent several months considering his options, and eventually chose to join Williams.However his father, who scored his fourth Dakar Rally victory with Audi last year, wanted his son to seriously consider the manufacturer’s offer. Audi will rebrand Sauber’s F1 team next year.
“My father, Carlos, is still disappointed that I didn’t choose Audi’s great offer a few months ago,” the F1 driver told Blick.
“After my dream of moving to Red Bull or Mercedes fell through, I had to decide between Audi, Alpine, and Williams. After visiting the factories and having discussions, my gut feeling immediately told me – go to Williams. They want a better future. And when my heart also said yes, the decision was made.”
Sainz added: “I hope that my father, who had great times with Audi, will soon be happy that I chose Williams.”
Speaking ahead of this weekend’s Australian Grand Prix, Sainz said his first impression of his new team was positive.
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“As soon as I jumped into the car [last year] and started working with the people I was going to work with this year, I felt I had just joined a team full of motivation, full of people wanting to bring this team back to the front,” he said.
“The car also didn’t disappoint me. It was a good test overall in Abu Dhabi and we’ve had a strong winter of development. We’ve tried to hit the ground running this year and we’ve had a positive test.”
However Sainz said it’s too early to predict how competitive the team might be. “Are we going to be half a second, one second off the leaders? I don’t know.
“But hopefully we can show progress. I think that’s the fundamental word for us this year: keep showing progress as a team and see where we end up.”
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Fer no.65 (@fer-no65)
13th March 2025, 12:09
Audi is such an unknown that it’s difficult to blame Carlos Jr for turning it down. I think Audi made a really bad decision buying into the team and leaving so much time before they turned “full Audi”.
El Pollo Loco
13th March 2025, 16:18
Edvaldo made a good point below in that, even if Sainz believed Audi was on the right track (despite more evidence saying the reverse), going from fighting for wins most weeks to easily the worst car on the grid overnight “would have been too much.” There’s a world of diff between going from Ferrari to a car that can fight for top 10s most weekends and going from fighting for wins to P19P/P20 w/only your teammate for competition every weekend. Surprised Bottas even wanted to stay TBH.
MichaelN
13th March 2025, 19:06
I’m really surprised by this. The recent prediction-questions reminded me of last year, where I apparently guessed we’d hear from Audi (in a negative way). We didn’t, but that might even be stranger. What exactly are they doing? Do they think they can just turn Sauber around over a single winter? That putting their engine into the Sauber is going to be good enough? It’s all quite weird.
Sainz obviously didn’t have great options (shame on Red Bull), but I can see why he went with Williams if these were the three teams he could choose from.
El Pollo Loco
14th March 2025, 1:04
It’s highly alarming IMO. Most teams would be making a ton of noise about their upcoming F1 debut. They seem to be hiding from theirs and using the excuse it won’t have their engine until 2026 to all but hide any connection with the team.
Coventry Climax
13th March 2025, 12:35
So far, I’ve not seen a single sign that makes me believe Audi will even be remotely succesful in F1, whatever they achieve with whomever in whatever other type of motorsport. It takes a lot more than just brandish a name.
Don’t worry Jr., just be proud to make your own choices, and if it helps: Sr will come around.
El Pollo Loco
13th March 2025, 14:45
I’m betting Jr. just made this comment to try and keep relations between his father and Audi healthy. They still do a lot of stuff together. I doubt senior is genuinely disappointed.
Anyway, they’ve had years now yet Hinwil still hasn’t grown an iota. Williams hired 300+ new employees over 2023-2024 alone. And they won’t be spending any big bucks now with German auto unions and the media watching them like a hawk after mass layoffs. Carlos dodged a huge bullet.
Frank
13th March 2025, 12:42
At tje risk that I will look stupid in 10 months time, I predict Sainz to outscore both Alpine drivers if the Williams is thereabouts. .
In fact, the only driver in the midfield that is capable to outscore Sainz over the entire season in more or less competitive machinery is Alonso.
MurasamaRA300 (@murasamara300)
13th March 2025, 13:46
I tend to agree with that, and I sense Williams may have had better cars than their results suggest for a number of years.
Sainz has four GP wins and 27 podiums to his name. Unless I’m very much mistaken, Williams have not had a proven GP winner driving for them since Felipe Massa.
Williams were doing considerably better when Massa & Bottas were driving for them, and it will be very interesting to see what Sainz can do.
If Alpine has a decent car then Gasly might not be too far off, but … yes, I think Sainz will beat both Alpines also.
El Pollo Loco
13th March 2025, 14:53
Indeed, Williams and AMR are the only two teams in the midfield with drivers that can drag more out of a car than it has. It’s also a huge luxury to know you have a driver who can get 100% out of the car and not always wonder how much of the problem is the driver.
I also genuinely think Williams and Alpine will be pretty well ahead of Aston, Haas and Sauber. Sauber is hopeless and
-Haas, unlike last year, isn’t going to inherit a big break through in Ferrari solving the rear suspension issues, especially since Haas is not going to be using Ferrari’s new front suspension
-Newey, so far at least, has focused solely on the 2026 car (this is directly from Cowell’s mouth). Maybe he will get around to trying to fix the AMR25 a bit, but I’m not optimistic about that.
So, Williams might be solely looking at competition from Alpine the majority of the time.
I have an opinion
13th March 2025, 13:36
Williams has neither the money nor the ambition to win a championship.
Audi does.
Fer no.65 (@fer-no65)
13th March 2025, 13:39
Does it, tho? it’s still a HUGE unknown…
anon
13th March 2025, 21:16
@fer-no65 in the case of Audi, it’s not really a question of if they could afford to do so, but more of a question of how committed Audi are to the project and whether they’re prepared to put that many resources into it.
At the moment, the signs from Audi have been a bit mixed. There have been rumours in the past that Audi was reluctant to allocate additional funding to hire more staff, but Sauber’s always found it difficult to significantly expand their workforce because they are so far away from all of the other motorsport centres in Europe, meaning it’s very disruptive for people to move there.
To that end, the announcement that Audi have now opened a new office in the UK in late 2024 suggests Audi are now prepared to increase their investments and expand the workforce of the team. However, against that, the internal politics within Audi have cast something of a shadow over the team and raised questions about their level of commitment, leaving the picture rather unclear.
Williams, by contrast, realistically don’t seem to be in a position to do much more than potentially challenge for position as the best midfield team. The prospects are probably modest, but equally the situation is much more straightforward and there is the hope that he can potentially do enough to keep himself in the public eye that, in the future, he may be able to move to a more competitive team.
El Pollo Loco
15th March 2025, 1:04
Prior to the budget cap era, I’d agree the most they can hope for is to compete for best of the rest. However, now that they are fully funded, are quickly replacing outdated infrastructure, have a that staff is just as big as that of Ferrari, Mercedes, etc. and McLaren showing you can be a customer team, there’s really no reason to believe Williams can’t be a team that can win races.
As for Audi, whether valid reason or excuses, the inability to expand its chassis operations neither rapidly or to the size of other teams is a major roadblock. Aside from 2008, under BMW, Sauber’s never produced a genuinely a title worthy chassis. Some recent additions mean they should be able to more consistently design good cars, but there’s no reason they’re now in a position to be winners simply because Audi owns them now.
El Pollo Loco
13th March 2025, 15:04
I see you have one, but it’s an incredibly uninformed one. Two actually (re: both Williams and Audi).
Coventry Climax
13th March 2025, 15:30
Hehe. To be fair though, an opinion is not necessarily based on being informed.
Or, by looking at today’s world, an opinion seems uninformed by definition.
Not that that improves the choice of avatar. ;-)
El Pollo Loco
13th March 2025, 15:46
I don’t know, man. Are you sure USAID didn’t engineer C-19? That made total sense to me. Elon’s own product, Grok, answering the question “who is the world’s biggest source of misinformation?” with “Elon Musk” must be one of the comedy highlights of the year (though a poor return for the cost).
Coventry Climax
13th March 2025, 16:32
Creative AI tools can be seen as sophisticated plagiarism software,
as they do not produce genuinely original content,
but rather emulate and modify existing works by artists,
subtly enough to circumvent copyright laws.
Signed: ChatGPT
El Pollo Loco
15th March 2025, 1:05
lolol Well played.
Patrick (@paeschli)
13th March 2025, 21:15
If Audi really had ambition they would have started a massive hiring spree years ago. But it seems like they have yet to invest a single cent in the team given recent results.
If Audi pulls a Brawn GP in 2026 and Nico Hülkenberg becomes world champion, that would be both hilarious and legendary. I would love to see it. But I haven’t seen a single shred of evidence pointing towards that being a possibility.
Jere (@jerejj)
13th March 2025, 15:11
Audi especially, but also Alpine simply have quite a few question marks regarding their long-term prospects, so declining both was understandable, & I’m surprised Binotto specifically named Sainz & Gasly for his Australian GP top 10 predictions.
Edvaldo
13th March 2025, 15:22
Anyone with an urge to achieve something fast would pass on that offer.
Sainz was driving a Ferrari 4 months ago, and, had he signed with Audi, he would be racing what is expected to be the worst car this year. That’s too much to handle.
And who can tell about Audi’s commitment to the sport? Renault comes and goes all the time, he was wise to place his bet somewhere else.
El Pollo Loco
13th March 2025, 15:39
Wrong an incredibly detailed list of all the problems Audi has had and is having, but I had switched to Chrome for a second and didn’t have plopzop blockers. Right as I was about to post, RF resets itself and erases everything.
A shortened version of the chaos/bad omens:
-they’ve already had a change of leadership on both the team and corporate side
-when the Audi executive who convinced the board to go ahead with the F1 program left, it was pretty clear they were considering dropping the project all together
-then, Germany has a major economic downturn and almost anything that could go wrong for the German auto sector did go wrong (lost cheap energy, its second most important market China’s economy goes flush, chip shortage, etc. and now even a looming trade war with most important market)
-highly public mass layoffs just as they finish buying last shares and so, after three years of delayed action with nothing getting done on the chassis side, they’re now too terrified to invest anymore into F1
-I thought they sold that 30% stake so they could invest without backlash, but we’ve seen so sign so far. Williams is now double the size of Hinwil and swimming with prestigious sponsors while Audi has some seedy gambling sponsor but otherwise pretty empty. Their trackside operations is a mess (at least they’ve got someone good coming in that area) and they’ve Binotto, who is a good technical kind, but not exactly a great leader of men. Maybe Wheatley and Binotto will divide those roles.
…end up being longer than I expected, but yeah. The signs are not great. I Have An Opinion must know something we don’t though.
Edvaldo
13th March 2025, 16:25
It makes total sense for Hulk, who’s 37, miraculously revived his career and is all about milking the works-team money while he still can, or Bortoleto who’s 20, talented and anything he does out of the ordinary with that car will be positive for his future.
But Sainz still aspires to something. A bad season with a bad team can mean the end of his chances at a future top team, or depending how the market goes, the end of his career as a F1 driver. He’s in the wild now, gotta be careful with his choices.
El Pollo Loco
14th March 2025, 1:08
Agreed on all points. I noted above that I thought your earlier point about Sauber being just too painful of a step down, at least in the near future, being an extremely good one I don’t think people credited enough as to why he seemed to not really even consider them.
El Pollo Loco
13th March 2025, 16:01
Wrote* (though wronging a detailed a list would be fun)