Chinese GP: Further qualifying pain for Williams F1 Team

By Williams F1 Team
March 14 2026

Coming into qualifying for the 2026 Chinese GP the expectations for the Atlassian Williams F1 Team were very limited in light of their struggles across Sprint qualifying and the Sprint, where Carlos would finish 12th & Alex 17th. And qualifying would prove to be equally as painful with Carlos Sainz finishing 17th and Alex Albon 18th seeing both out in Q1. Carlos was able to see some positives from the session but for Alex his only word to describe the session was terrible.

Atlassian Williams F1 Team Chinese GP Sprint - Qualifying

Carlos Sainz:
"I’m really happy with my lap today. We’ve made strong progress this weekend and got the car into a better window for this session. I still feel like I’m a bit down on mileage to unlock more performance but I’ll take the positives as we maximised everything we could today. We are very far from where we want to be and tomorrow will still be a challenging race, but it’s another learning opportunity as we try to get the most out of this package and keep improving."

Alex Albon:
"Unfortunately we haven’t been able to fix our core issues and the car wasn’t reacting the way it should in the Sprint and qualifying today. We’ve done a lot of setup changes this weekend where we’ve tested and tried various things out and we just haven’t been able to find the sweet spot yet. We thought this track would expose our weaknesses more than Melbourne did, and it continues to be a learning curve for us, but we’re throwing everything at it as a team. We will have a long engineering debrief tonight to discuss our balance options for tomorrow and what we can do to maximise our performance for race day."

James Vowles Team Principal:
"We found a better direction with Carlos overnight. They're small steps, but they're steps in the right direction. We need to see what we can do with Alex across the next 24 hours in order to give him a better car than he had today.

Nevertheless, these qualifying sessions remain painful because we're simply not where we want to be. There's a programme of work that's already in place that will make substantive change to where we are. For now, we need to keep our heads held high and keep delivering everything the car can every session."

Track: Shanghai International Circuit, Shanghai		Lap Length: 5.451 km
Sprint Race
C Sainz	• Finished: P12 • Started: P17 • Strategy: Hard (no stop) • Fastest lap: 1:37.913
A Albon	• Finished: P16 • Started: Pit lane • Strategy: Medium to Soft (1 stop) • Fastest lap: 1:38.1584

Grand Prix Qualifying
C Sainz	• Finished: P17 • Q1: 1:34.317
A Albon	• Finished: P18 • Q1: 1:34.772