Experimental Friday for Carlos Sainz in Austin

Friday, 24 October 2026:

- Free Practice 1: P19, 1:38.846, 19 laps

- Free Practice 2: P20, 1:38.446, 28 laps

• Carlos Sainz followed a different run plan in the first practice session of the United States GP, as he was focused on experimenting with different set-ups to gather valuable data which will contribute to the development of next year’s car.
• The Williams race driver worked across the three tyre compounds available for this race: he used the Medium and the Hard tyres in Free Practice 1, while in Free Practice 2 he ran on the Medium and the Soft options.
• His fastest time in the second practice session came in the Medium tyre, because he was forced to abort his fastest lap on the Soft. He hopes he can take a step forward on Saturday after analysing all the data from today.

QUOTES:

“We knew it was going to be a tough circuit for us; the medium to high speed longer corners just don’t suit our car, so we chose to use FP1 to try different set ups and gather some data which will help us to prepare for next year. For FP2 we went back to a normal run plan and unfortunately the performance struggles proved to match the expectation. Having said that, the weekend is only getting started and we will continue to dig into the data and try to improve as much as possible for both qualifying and the race”.

COMING UP:

Saturday, 25 October 2026:

- Free Practice 3: 12:30 local time (19:30 CEST)

- Qualifying: 16:00 local time (23:00 CEST)