Williams drivers raise alarm over reliability issues as tests planned for British GP weekend

Carlos Sainz hopes to turn things around for the British Grand Prix after a disastrous weekend in Austria saw him out of the race before it had even begun. To make matters worse, his Williams team-mate Alex Albon retired with similar reliability issues. The Spanish driver has now raised concerns about this while also revealing that the team is still working on understanding the issues that Albon ran into last Sunday.

The Williams driver ran into issues on the formation lap when his FW47’s gearbox started to fail, leaving him stranded in the grid box. After eventually moving off the start line, he made his way to the pit lane as the race start was aborted. As he prepared to start the race once again, his rear brakes caught fire, ending his race before it had started.

Later in the race, Albon was forced to retire for unknown issues. The Grove outfit has been investigating this but is yet to reveal the cause of the DNF.

Heading into the British Grand Prix weekend, Sainz has raised concerns about the reliability of their machinery.

“Obviously, there’s a certain level of concern within the team of having so many reliability issues, three in a row, Alex and the brake issue with me,” he said to Motorsport.com and other media. “The brake was a lot of things coming together that we understand now why it happened and it shouldn’t happen again.

“The issue on Alex’s car that has happened a few in a row now is something that obviously we are trying to solve and trying to understand and for that we are doing everything we can to understand it this weekend because it’s a very very strange issue that only happens on race day.

“We only see it happening on race day so it you cannot simulate it in certain points of the weekend, even though we try our best, but yeah we’ll keep working on it.”

Carlos Sainz, Williams

Photo by: Peter Fox / Getty Images

He added, “Very hectic for sure for the whole factory, for us as drivers, and all the engineers involved. We’re trying our best to get on top of all these issues and situations.

“I think one thing that is keeping us calm and encouraged is that the speed of the car is there. I’m very confident we could have won the midfield battle in Austria even almost starting from the back with the pace we had and yeah every race, we are actually very quick and we have a very competitive car. But we just need to obviously start putting things together.”

While speaking in the press conference ahead of the British Grand Prix, Albon confirmed that the team is set to run tests during the first practice session to try and iron out the recurring issue.

“Firstly, we need to understand why we’ve had so many DNFs. It’s a recurring issue. We have some tests to try to understand where it’s coming from. We’ll change our own plan and try to get to the bottom of it, but it’s not totally solved yet.

“So, obviously, it would be nice to finish the race on Sunday, and we’re working hard. We’ve done a lot of work back at the factory over the last two days to understand it more and more. I think we know what area we need to focus on, and then hopefully FP1 produces some results that we can move on from.”