Williams revealed their new 2025 car in a one-off livery ahead of a season they hope the high-profile arrival of Carlos Sainz helps them move up the Formula 1 grid.
Launching the new car at Silverstone a day after McLaren became the first team to run a 2025 challenger at the same venue, Sainz drove the first lap in the FW47 shortly after 10am on Friday.
The event was the first time that the team’s impressive new-look line-up of Sainz and Alex Albon, who will drive later on Friday, was seen in tandem publicly together.
Speaking immediately after driving his first lap, Sainz said: “I can tell you everything went fine, which is good news.
“An install lap of a newly born car is always a bit tricky, but everything worked as it should and now we’re ready to get into the run plan.
“I need to give feedback – the two or three things that I felt that could be improved, or the feeling inside the cockpit that I want to talk to them about – then we’ll get the car ready to run on slicks and probably start pushing it little by little.”
All 10 F1 teams are holding off from revealing their actual 2025 racing liveries until next week’s season launch event at the O2 Arena in London, which is live on Sky Sports F1 from 8pm on Tuesday February 18.
Williams team principal James Vowles said: “It’s an evolution of last year’s car. We have had a reasonable winter but it’s always difficult to know because the field as we finished the last race, we qualified within half a second of one another, so the field is closing and you don’t know how good of a winter the others have had.
“What I can say is I’m proud of the work we have achieved across the winter. When you look at the car, you can see a thousand details that are another evolution of what we did before, so there has been no bolt left from where it was, we are making sure we continuously move the team forward.”
Williams earlier this week announced a new title sponsor after signing what the team described as the “biggest partnership deal” in their long history, with software company Atlassian.
Williams team principal James Vowles was in full praise of Sainz’s influence on the team so far
The Grove-based team, who are nine-time constructors’ champions in F1 but last won a title in 1997 and a race in 2012, head into their third season under the leadership of Vowles.
On the team’s chances of achieving a podium finish in 2025, Vowles added: “Nothing is impossible. There were a few surprises last year. We have a lot more of the ingredients available to us.
“On a normal race weekend, it will be unlikely but there are circumstances that will fall our way and we have two of the strongest drivers that will give it absolutely everything, as will I.”
The 45-year-old joined from Mercedes in 2023, where he had been the Silver Arrows’ strategy director, and has set about overhauling Williams and off track with the aim of catching up with rivals and putting the foundations in place for longer-term success into F1’s new era of rules from 2026.
After beating midfield rivals Alpine and Sauber to the signature of Sainz – who was let go by Ferrari so they could bring in seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton – Williams have a multiple-race-winning driver in their line-up for the first time since Felipe Massa in 2017.
Vowles described the signing of Sainz, who won four Grands Prix at Ferrari and finished fifth in last year’s world championship, on a two-year deal as “strong statement of intent” when the move was announced last year.
The 30-year-old Spaniard joins Albon, 28, in an experienced and fast line-up that is already widely regarded as one of the best on this season’s much-changed grid.
Albon starts his fourth season at the Williams having consistently proved their lead driver in his time at Grove so far, but now clearly facing his toughest in-house challenge yet.
Will Williams be back on the up with Sainz-Albon in 2025?
After moving up from 10th and last in the Constructors’ Championship to a surprise seventh in Vowles’ first year in charge, Williams slipped slightly backwards to ninth in 2024 and scored 11 fewer points.
Amid the introduction of new methods and working practices at their factory last winter, the team experienced a particularly fraught start to the 24-race season.
The FW46 was initially off the pace and overweight, while the lack of a spare chassis for the season’s early flyaway rounds saw them suffer the embarrassment of being left with only one raceable car at the Australian Grand Prix when Alex Albon did significant damage to his in a crash during Friday practice in Melbourne.
Williams scored only four points, all through Albon, in the first half of the campaign and eventually lost patience with the form of American driver Logan Sargeant, who was dropped in August days after a huge crash in practice at the Dutch Grand Prix.
Junior driver Franco Colapinto was handed the second seat for the season’s final nine rounds and the Argentine made a swift initial acclimatisation to F1, twice scoring points in his first four races – with Albon also on the scoreboard again – as Williams found car improvements in the campaign’s final months.
Watch all 24 race weekends from the 2025 Formula 1 season live on Sky Sports F1, starting with the Australian GP on March 14-16. Stream Sky Sports with NOW – No contract, cancel anytime
