Carlos Sainz disagrees with Lewis Hamilton over British GP reality | F1 | Sport

After qualifying on pole for the Sprint race at Silverstone on Friday evening, Lewis Hamilton revisited his comments from earlier in the week. He had been worried about how F1’s 2026 engines would deploy around the circuit, particularly in the high-speed sections, and told reporters he thought the British Grand Prix track would not feel the same.

Not everyone agrees with that assessment, though. Carlos Sainz, driving a Williams car with a Mercedes engine, certainly didn’t get the level of deployment that he was looking for. While Hamilton felt Silverstone was still brilliant to drive, Sainz felt the iconic circuit had lost some of its appeal with the new generation of engines.

“It’s probably the most difficult one up until now for this concept of engine,” the Spaniard said. “The simulator was pretty shocking, which was just like a clear sign and understanding that whatever we came up with for this year is not good enough. That’s why the regs change was necessary for next year, because a great racetrack, like this being a bit, not spoiled, but downgraded because of the way you do an engine, is not what F1 should be about.

“You basically run out of energy and power very quickly into the high speed and because there’s a combination of very high speed corners you don’t harvest any battery, so you’re only sitting on – I don’t know how many horsepower the car has, but without the electric – but you’re obviously a lot slower into the high speed and you don’t have as much power and as much momentum through it, so it’s quite a bit down on last year.”

Those comments were made earlier in the weekend but, unlike Hamilton, his tune had not really changed after Friday’s running. Sainz said: “Probably one of the most entertaining tracks, my opinion, for the wrong reasons, because we are very energy starved, and we will be playing with the, ‘I spend [energy] here, but then you pass me back’. I think you will see a bit of yo-yo racing again this weekend, which is what it is. The changes are done for next year, but the crowd is amazing.”

As Sainz alluded to, changes are being implemented over the next couple of years to decrease reliance on the batteries and to a 60:40 split between combustion and electrical power. Sainz thinks that will make things better, but doubts it will get the full potential out of the track.

He said: “It will improve it. It’s not what we would want still, because it’s not the full lap with all the power that an F1 car should have, but the power will make you arrive quicker into these corners and cut later, so the feeling of the car should be better.”