- Carlos Sainz has a “crazy idea” that could change how F1 crowns its world champion.
- Sainz has raced for five F1 teams, more than almost anyone on the current grid.
- His 2026 season at Williams has produced three ninth-place finishes at best.
Carlos Sainz has raced for five Formula 1 teams across more than a decade in the sport. That journey has given him a perspective few drivers can claim. And recently, he used it to share an idea that cuts to the heart of what F1’s drivers’ championship actually measures.
Speaking to Spanish publication Mundo Deportivo, Sainz proposed a format in which no driver stays with any team for more than two races in a season.
Every driver would rotate through every constructor over a 20-race calendar. The title, in his vision, would reflect only driving ability, with no car advantage to distort the result.
“I have a somewhat crazy idea that I don’t think I’ve ever talked about publicly,” Sainz told Mundo Deportivo. “I’ve always imagined an F1 where teams and drivers are separated.”
The proposal keeps the two championships intact but pulls them fully apart. Drivers earn points across all teams they race for. Teams accumulate points from whichever drivers happen to be in their cars that weekend.
“In that case, the driver would be part of F1, not a team,” Sainz explained. “He would be an F1 client, hired by F1 to drive the cars. So, I’d have the chance to do two races with Williams, two with Mercedes, two with Ferrari, and so on. All drivers would have exactly the same chance of winning the title.”
Sainz acknowledged the idea belongs in the realm of fantasy. “This will never happen, of course,” he said. But the fact that he raised it at all says something worth examining.
Why this idea resonates right now
Sainz is not having an easy 2026. His best results with Williams this season are three ninth-place finishes. At his home race in Barcelona, he qualified 16th and finished 12th. Race winner Lewis Hamilton lapped him twice.
“I’m going so slowly that I’m not enjoying myself,” Sainz said earlier in the season. “I’m just doing what I can with what I have.”
Williams arrived at the 2026 season overweight after missing private testing in Barcelona before the official pre-season testing.
The previous year’s car delivered two podiums for Sainz, which he admits shaped his expectations for 2026. The gap between those expectations and where Williams now stands has been wide.
It would be easy to read his proposal as a frustrated driver venting. But that reading is too shallow.
What Sainz is really pointing at is an old and unresolved question. Does the drivers’ championship actually identify the best driver? The 2026 regulation reset has reshuffled the grid sharply.
Sainz himself used Hamilton as an example of how much the car shapes perception after the 7-time world champion claimed victory in Barcelona.
“You go to a team with a car you don’t like and spend three years there without adapting,” Sainz said. “Then you go to a team with a car that suits your style, and you look like a god. It’s a much more complicated sport than people think.”
That contradiction is what his crazy idea is all about.
A beautiful impossibility
Sainz is only the second driver in history, after Alain Prost, to have raced for Renault, McLaren, Ferrari and Williams. He has seen the sport from junior outfits to its most iconic constructors. His idea carries weight for that very reason.
But he also understands why his idea cannot work. Teams spend hundreds of millions developing cars partly to attract elite drivers.
Sponsors pay for specific names on specific liveries. The whole commercial structure of the sport rests on the driver and team being bound together.
There is also a practical problem that Sainz knows personally.
He has spoken at length about how much time it takes to feel genuinely comfortable in a new car, describing “cracking the code” as a process that demands multiple races and real experience with the machinery. Two races per team would not be enough for any driver to perform at their ceiling.
Sainz called the proposal “crazy” himself. He raised no expectation that anyone in power would consider it seriously.
What he offered instead was a philosophical challenge. If the sport’s goal is to crown the best driver in the world, the car remains the largest variable standing in the way of that verdict.
F1 has always accepted that variable because the engineering battle is central to the sport’s identity. But the question of whether the drivers’ championship is truly about drivers has never been answered cleanly.
Sainz’s idea will stay hypothetical, but it lands because it exposes the tension F1 has always lived with: the drivers’ crown is individual, while the route to it is inseparable from the car underneath.
