Report: Our Saturday in Shanghai

Atlassian Williams F1 Team gained places in the Sprint before an early exit in qualifying

Published

14 MAR 2026

Est. reading time

3 min

There were no points, but some signs of encouragement in China as we tackled the maiden Sprint race of the 2026 Formula 1 season.

A combined 11 positions gained between Carlos Sainz and Alex Albon showed that Atlassian Williams F1 Team’s race pace can keep us among the midfield.

Qualifying, however, saw us ducking out in Q1 meaning both cars will start from the ninth row in tomorrow’s Chinese GP, with Carlos in P17 and Alex in P18.

Those quali laps had Carlos set a 1:34.317 and two tenths from a Q2 appearance, while Alex set a 1:34.772.

A pit lane start for our No. 23 meant had Sprint beginning with a different suspension setup on one FW48, and it looked to pay off over the opening laps.

Carlos navigated from P17 to P14 on the opening lap as other collided and went off the track while Alex advanced up to P16.

The Williams pair soon ran line astern as Max Verstappen passed Carlos, and the four-time champion next passed Franco Colapinto to give our duo a new target ahead.

Audi’s Nico Hulkenberg was a threat behind, though, and the German passed Alex into the hairpin, but there’d be time to fight back with a long train of cars forming from P9.

Improvements for both came as Colapinto fell to Carlos after the two went wheel-to-wheel for most of the lap before passing Gabriel Bortoleto, too, while Alex jumped up as Hulkenberg retired.

The Audi stopped at Turn 1 to trigger a Safety Car, and we split our strategies by pitting Alex for fresh softs and leaving Carlos out on his hards.

That pushed the No. 55 to P11 when the green flag waved, while Alex restarted the race in P16.

Battles with Isack Hadjar and Fernando Alonso kept Albono busy until the flag, while Verstappen passed Carlos for P11 on the line.

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James Vowles, Team Principal:

“We found a better direction with Carlos overnight. They're small steps, but they're steps in the right direction. We need to see what we can do with Alex across the next 24 hours in order to give him a better car than he had today. Nevertheless, these qualifying sessions remain painful because we're simply not where we want to be. There's a programme of work that's already in place that will make substantive change to where we are. For now, we need to keep our heads held high and keep delivering everything the car can every session.”

Carlos Sainz

“I’m really happy with my lap today. We’ve made strong progress this weekend and got the car into a better window for this session. I still feel like I’m a bit down on mileage to unlock more performance but I’ll take the positives as we maximised everything we could today. We are very far from where we want to be and tomorrow will still be a challenging race, but it’s another learning opportunity as we try to get the most out of this package and keep improving.”

Alex Albon

“Unfortunately we haven’t been able to fix our core issues and the car wasn’t reacting the way it should in the Sprint and qualifying today. We’ve done a lot of setup changes this weekend where we’ve tested and tried various things out and we just haven’t been able to find the sweet spot yet. We thought this track would expose our weaknesses more than Melbourne did, and it continues to be a learning curve for us, but we’re throwing everything at it as a team. We will have a long engineering debrief tonight to discuss our balance options for tomorrow and what we can do to maximise our performance for race day.”

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