For the Williams Racing Formula 1 team the month of June turned into something of a recurring nightmare.
Having logged an impressive 54 points in the first eight races of the 2025 season Alex Albon and Carlos Sainz earned just a single further point between them in the three events held last month since their double score in Monaco in May.
Sometimes luck just seems to go against you, and much as Sauber enjoyed a near perfect run over those same three races while logging 20 points, so Williams has been facing an ongoing scenario of what can go wrong going wrong.
Indeed Albon posted a remarkable three retirements in a row, with accident damage in Spain followed by PU overheating issues in both Canada and Austria.
Meanwhile Sainz failed even to start last weekend after an issue with the brakes, something of a recurrent problem for him in recent weekends.
The frustration is that despite the team struggling to fully optimise the FW47 on qualifying on soft tyres good points have still been on offer.
In Austria Albon appeared to have fortune on his side as he jumped from 12th to seventh at the start, and had he not hit trouble he would have had a good chance of finishing sixth.
It didn’t happen however, and this week the team has faced some soul-searching as it tries to put things right for Silverstone.
For Sainz not even starting at the Red Bull Ring was a painful if familiar experience, given that he’s had similar experiences previously at both McLaren and Ferrari.
This time the rear brakes stuck on, which triggered an aborted start as he was not able to get away on the formation lap. When he did get round to the pits the brakes were cooked, and that was that.
“I don’t know why this happens to me as a driver so often,” he said when I asked him about not getting a chance to race. “It happened a few times that I don’t even get to start the race and yeah, today just a different issue.
“We couldn’t change the brakes [before the race]. We had a pretty big issue yesterday in quali, but we managed to correct it. So laps to the grid, the car was fine. I was ready to race, but then suddenly, on the lap to grid, I found we had another issue.
“The first gear didn’t go in because the rear brakes were stuck. And then I understood, and I power cycled the car and tried to get going, but in the end the issue came back, I got fire, and that was it.”
Sainz was adamant that there was performance in the car, despite his lowly P19 on the grid.
“Again today we I think we would have been quickest midfield car on the race run, but we struggled with soft tyres, for sure. Since I was P1 in Q2 in Imola, I don’t know what has happened, what’s changed in the car, but something in qualifying on soft tyres doesn’t seem to click, so we need to keep working on that.
“Then we are still very quick on Sundays, like we saw in Canada, we saw today, we saw in Monaco even, we can have good race pace. So we have a strong car, strong package. We just need to execute weekends, and stop having issues.”
Any retirement is costly when the midfield battle is so close, especially in an era when a lot of teams are showing bulletproof reliability.
Williams sits in fifth place and still has a decent advantage over the rest of the midfield, but that gap could disappear.
“Clearly, too many issues yesterday, too many issues today,” said Sainz as he reflected on recent form. “We’re having a tough run as a team, very scrappy first half of the season.
“And I must say, even if we are very quick as a team, and I think I’ve adapted quickly to the car, we seem to have too many problems when it counts and when it matters.
“Doesn’t matter if it’s reliability, strategy or weekend execution. So time to regroup. It’s true, we don’t have much time, but Silverstone, it’s our home Grand Prix, and we need to regroup to see what we can do better.”
Expanding on the theme he added: “It just shows we are going through a tough period in a tough time for the team, and we need to understand why, because clearly it’s costing us a lot of points.
“We have a decent car. We haven’t upgraded it much, but we have an upgrade coming soon.
“We just need to get better at executing weekends. People were asking me before if it’s related to focusing on next year, and it’s not, it should be completely unrelated.
“The way you execute a race weekend, and reliability-wise, has nothing to do with putting the focus on next year.
“So we should use these issues we’re having this year, and all of these problems, to learn as a team to execute better weekends.”
Sainz admitted that he and Albon both have to play their part in trying to improve things.
“All of the big leaders of the team, we need to take responsibility and leadership,” he said. “We all need to take also accountability in what we are doing wrong as a team.
“This is one aspect of the team that I fully back, and I fully trust that we are capable of doing that.
“Now we need to test ourselves to see how quick as a team we can respond to these issues, and come back stronger, because I’m sure there’s going to be responsibility and leadership. I’m sure there’s going to be. So it’s just a matter of in testing times, how quick you can recover from all these issues, and it will put us to test.”
For Albon the Austrian retirement was particularly frustrating as he’d taken advantage of the Antonelli/Verstappen clash to jump up the order, and it all seemed to be going his way.
“Obviously a little bit fortunate,” said the Thai/British driver. “The waves parted a little bit, but we were in the right place at the right time, and we had a good car, had a nice overtake on Pierre, and were pulling away from the cars behind.
“I was actually catching George towards the end of my stint. And then we covered off Gasly, I think, and then we ran into the issues.
“Maybe something after the pit stop just picked up. It looks similar to Canada, if anything. Yeah, we need to review it. Obviously, we’ve had three DNFs a row now, so we’re lacking the mileage at the moment.
“I don’t know. It’s the same car as it was at the beginning of the year, and it was a lot more reliable at the beginning of the year. So I’m not sure if it’s temperatures that we’re running at that’s making us struggle.”
Albon noted before the weekend started that after getting too hot the Montreal PU would be tested on Friday, and it seemed to be healthy: “We did long running in traffic as well, just a double check, triple check, and then we come to the race, and it’s still an issue.”
He agrees that the team has to get its act together this weekend, not least because it’s a circuit that should suit the car.
“I’m a little bit worried. I don’t know what we can do. We can’t afford it to happen in Silverstone, because I think that’s a good track for us.
“We’ve missed out on good points today, with all the DNFs happening to the top teams. So yeah, very frustrating. I’m not sure the next track being a home track, if that helps us a bit, just with efficiency in getting things to the car. But we’ll deep dive, and try to find a solution.”
Adam Cooper F1 