Carlos Sainz Has a “Crazy” Idea That Would Completely Reinvent the F1 Championship
Carlos Sainz is having a rough 2026 season at Williams, but his mind is clearly working overtime. Speaking to Spanish publication Mundo Deportivo, Sainz floated what he called “a slightly crazy idea, which I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned in the press” – before adding, “No, I don’t know if I can say it.”
He said it anyway, and it’s worth thinking through properly.
Sainz has long envisioned a Formula 1 where manufacturers and drivers operate as entirely separate entities – “which will never happen, of course” – built around a 20-race calendar where each driver spends exactly two rounds with each constructor.
The format would mean no driver is ever tied to a single team’s fortunes for a full season. Good car, bad car, you share the pain and the glory equally with every other driver on the grid.
Why a Driver Stuck at the Back of the Grid Would Love This Idea
The proposal would fundamentally change what it means to be a Formula 1 driver. Under Sainz’s format, “Then the driver is part of F1, not part of a team, he’s a client that Formula 1 hires to drive the cars.” The machinery rotates; the talent is what stays constant.
“Then I’d have my chance to do two races with Williams, two with Mercedes, two with Ferrari… All the drivers would have exactly the same opportunity to win the World Championship.”
That’s the core appeal: a title fight decided by the person behind the wheel, not by which team happened to hit the regulatory reset button at the right moment. Sainz continued: “You’d completely disassociate the brands from the drivers. And that way you’d have a real drivers’ championship and a real manufacturers’ championship.”
Why It Will Never Actually Happen
Sainz himself acknowledged the idea has essentially zero chance of being implemented given the sport‘s deeply embedded team identities and commercial framework – and it would take considerable convincing to get drivers in the best machinery to then race for the teams at the rear of the field.
That second point is the one that tends to get glossed over. Max Verstappen taking a Sauber for two rounds while a backmarker gets his Red Bull would make for extraordinary television. It would also make for extraordinary resistance from Red Bull’s legal team.
Sainz is only the second driver after Alain Prost to have raced for Renault, McLaren, Ferrari, and Williams, so he has lived the reality of the current system more acutely than most. He knows exactly what it costs a driver to land at the wrong team during the wrong regulation era, and the idea reads less like a genuine proposal and more like a deeply honest diagnosis of what Formula 1 gets wrong. The championship rewards machinery as much as talent. He just said the quiet part out loud.
