Friday, 13 March 2026:
- Free Practice 1: P17, 1:35.679, 18 laps
- Sprint Qualifying: P17, 1:34.761

• An issue with the telemetry of Carlos Sainz’s Williams FW38 shortened considerably his run plan for the one and only practice session of the Chinese GP.
• The Williams race driver was eliminated in the first round of the Sprint Qualifying, although he was able to put together a good lap despite his lack of mileage. He was less than two tenths away from making the cut to SQ2.
• The Spanish driver feels that the priority now is learning as much as possible and hence his goal for the upcoming sessions this weekend will be experimenting different things in an effort to take a step forward as a team.

QUOTES:
“This weekend was always going to be difficult for us with this circuit exposing the weaknesses in our car. Missing half of FP1 didn’t help either, as I couldn’t prepare properly for this session and had to adapt every lap. As it stands, we first need a clean weekend before aiming for better results. I'll use this weekend to test different setups and try to make up for the track time I’ve lost so far. The target is to maximise our performance and keep gathering learnings to help the team".

COMING UP:
Saturday, 14 March 2026:
- Sprint: 10:30 local time (03:30 CET)
- Qualifying: 14:30 local time (07:30 CET)