Carlos Sainz

Carlos Sainz was always going to end up racing for a living — his father, also called Carlos Sainz, is a two-time World Rally Champion and one of the most respected names in motorsport history. Growing up around that level of competition gave the younger Sainz an unusually clear-eyed, professional approach to his own career from very early on. He worked his way up through karting and single-seaters with steady, methodical progress rather than dominant title wins, catching Red Bull's junior programme's attention before eventually making his F1 debut with Toro Rosso in 2015.

What's defined Sainz's career more than any single result is his adaptability. He's driven for five different teams in F1 — Toro Rosso, Renault, McLaren, Ferrari and now Williams — and been genuinely competitive at every single one of them, a rarer skill than it sounds. Plenty of drivers thrive in one car built around their preferences and struggle the moment the machinery changes; Sainz has repeatedly walked into unfamiliar garages and made himself fast quickly, which is a large part of why he's remained in demand across the grid for a decade.

His McLaren years, from 2019 to 2020, coincided with the team's climb back toward the front, and he built a reputation there as an excellent qualifier and a fierce racer who rarely made unforced errors. That reputation earned him one of the most coveted seats in the sport: Ferrari, from 2021, partnering Charles Leclerc in one of F1's glamour teams. Sainz more than held his own there, taking his maiden Grand Prix win in Britain in 2022 and following it with more wins in the years after, including a masterful drive in Singapore that's remembered as one of the smartest tyre-management performances of recent seasons.

The end of his Ferrari chapter came with a twist that's become one of the more talked-about storylines in recent driver-market history: Ferrari chose to sign Lewis Hamilton for 2025, meaning Sainz — a race winner, a proven points scorer, a driver who'd done nothing obviously wrong — needed a new home. He landed at Williams, a team in the middle of its own rebuilding project under new ownership and leadership, bringing genuine race-winning experience to a garage that badly needed it.

It's been a different kind of challenge for Sainz: rather than fighting for wins in a front-running car, he's been asked to help drag a midfield team back up the grid, mentoring the technical direction as much as driving the car fast on Sundays. It's not the glamorous ending his Ferrari years might have suggested was coming, but it plays exactly to the trait that's carried his whole career — walking into a new team and making himself, and it, better.