Williams has launched an investigation into the repeat reliability issues suffered by Carlos Sainz and Alex Albon in the F1 2025 season.

It comes after Sainz failed to start last weekend’s Austrian Grand Prix at the Red Bull Ring, where Albon suffered a third consecutive retirement with a technical issue.

Williams working to fix ‘recurring issue’ after Carlos Sainz DNS

Additional reporting by Thomas Maher

After an underwhelming 2024 season, Williams’ FW47 car has shown promising pace in the first half of F1 2025 with Albon recording three top-five results in Melbourne, Miami and Imola.

Those eye-catching results see Williams occupy fifth place in the Constructors’ standings entering this weekend’s British Grand Prix at Silverstone with a 19-point lead over sixth-placed Racing Bulls.

However, Williams’ patchy reliability record has become a growing concern with Sainz and Albon suffering a combined total of five DNF to date.

Carlos Sainz vs Alex Albon: Williams head-to-head scores for F1 2025

???? F1 2025: Head-to-head qualifying statistics between team-mates

???? F1 2025: Head-to-head race statistics between team-mates

The situation reached a new low in Austria as Sainz failed to start and Albon withdrew after 15 laps, resulting in Williams’ first double retirement of the season.

Speaking to media including PlanetF1.com in Thursday’s press conference at Silverstone, Albon confirmed that Williams is set to carry out tests in Friday’s opening practice session in a bid to get to the bottom of the problem.

He said: “Firstly, we need to understand why we’ve had so many DNFs. It’s a recurring issue.

“We have some tests in FP1 to try to understand where it’s coming from. We’ll change our run 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 a factory over the last two days to 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.”

Sainz struggled to pull away at the start of the formation lap in Austria, triggering an aborted start.

When he eventually got going and returned to the pit lane, his hopes of taking the start in Spielberg were destroyed by a brake fire.

The former Ferrari driver admitted that Williams is growing concerned with the number of reliability issues, with the team now understanding why he failed to start in Austria.

“Obviously, there’s a certain level of concern within the team of having so many reliability issues, three [retirements] in a row for Alex and the brake issue with me,” he said.

“The brake [issue] 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 strange issue that only happens on race day.

“We only see it happening on race day, so you cannot simulate it in certain at certain points of the weekend even though we try our best.

“But we’ll keep working on it.”

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Asked about the atmosphere in the Williams garage this week as the team seek a fix, 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 in the car is there.

“I’m very confident we could have won the midfield battle in Austria, even starting almost from the back, with the pace we had.

“Every race we are actually very quick and we have a very competitive car, but we just need to obviously put start putting things together and [stop] making these mistakes as a team, which I think it happen.”

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