If we were to ask what Jacky Ickx, Alain Prost and Nigel Mansell have in common, the answer may not be obvious to everyone. Sure, they're all Formula 1 legends – though Ickx wrote the most glorious chapters of his career at Le Mans – but they're also the only three drivers who have raced Ferrari, McLaren and Williams cars at some point in their careers, with Carlos Sainz now set to join them in 2025.
With 34 drivers' titles and 33 constructors' crowns gathered between them, these squads enjoy an historic aura. Red Bull and Mercedes cannot necessarily say as much. They may be catching up with McLaren and Williams in terms of world championship victories, but they've been around since 2005 and 2010 only respectively – though the German brand did race briefly, yet successfully, in the 1950s. In comparison, McLaren has been around since the 1960s, Williams since the 1970s, while Ferrari prides itself on having been present since the first F1 season.
Ickx's case is somewhat different to his peers'. The iconic Ferrari driver, who was runner-up with the Scuderia in 1970, didn't actually race for the current Williams team – he entered eight grands prix with Williams cars in 1976 for Frank Williams Racing Cars (which was to become Walter Wolf Racing) and he failed to qualify in half of these. His time at McLaren came down to a single race as the team entered a third car at the Nurburgring in 1973 – with Ickx achieving a podium finish behind the untouchable Tyrrells.
Prost's and Mansell's cases are much more comparable to Sainz's in that all three of them raced for these actual teams and ended up there as part of real career decisions. Both Prost and Mansell spent nearly a decade at those outfits, with their career trajectories deeply intertwined.
They were title rivals in 1986, with McLaren's Prost narrowly beating Williams' Mansell, before they both ended up at Ferrari in 1990 – Mansell had joined a year prior, with Williams having lost its Honda engines (and its competitiveness) to McLaren, where the intense Ayrton Senna rivalry had taken its toll on Prost in 1988 and 1989.
Prost outperformed Mansell at Ferrari, and the Briton went back to Williams in 1991, this time with a Renault engine. Mansell went on to win the world title in 1992, before Prost – after a sabbatical – had the same success with the Didcot-based outfit the following year. Now over 40 years old and committed to the North American CART championship, Mansell was called upon by Williams for a few races late in the 1994 season after Ayrton Senna's death, being the sole world champion then racing in F1. He went on to sign with McLaren for the following campaign, but his fitness was not on point and the car was uncompetitive, so the experience was cut short.
Fast-forward 30 years, and Sainz is completing this Big Three, but there is a stark contrast with his predecessors' record, Prost and Mansell having amassed 73 victories from 281 race starts in those squads, while Sainz can boast just three from 115 and seems unlikely to add to this tally with Williams in the near future.
A Red Bull junior and Formula Renault 3.5 champion, Sainz was maybe unlucky to make his Formula 1 debut alongside generational talent Max Verstappen in 2015, and with the path to Red Bull subsequently blocked by Verstappen and Daniel Ricciardo, he made a shrewd move to Renault for the last four rounds of the 2017 season and the following campaign.
However, Sainz compared unfavourably to team-mate Nico Hulkenberg. So, when Ricciardo decided to join Renault for 2019, having become disenchanted with his own Red Bull situation, Sainz was cast aside.
Sainz had a realistic choice between the bottom three teams in the championship, all very keen for him to join: the troubled Alpine and Sauber/Audi projects, with fluctuating management and somewhat uncertain long-term future, and Williams
Red Bull opted to promote Pierre Gasly as a Ricciardo replacement, and Sainz had no choice but to sign with McLaren – which at the time didn't look like a step forward by any means: during the 2018 summer break, as the silly season went wild, Renault held fourth place in the constructors' championship with 82 points while McLaren was only seventh with 52. Sainz had only scored 30, lagging behind Hulkenberg's 52. At that stage, the only team-mate he had outperformed was Daniil Kvyat at Toro Rosso, and Sainz looked like an audacious bet by McLaren.
Little did anyone know that Renault was peaking while McLaren's recovery following its challenging Honda era, led by Sainz alongside rookie Lando Norris, would bring the team to third place in the 2020 constructors' championship.
This was incomparable to Prost's six seasons at McLaren, which had yielded three world titles, but Sainz had impressed enough to land the second Ferrari seat for 2021 after a dismal 2020 campaign for veteran Sebastian Vettel.
Charles Leclerc has however proven to be Sainz's toughest partner so far – partly based on the fact that both Verstappen and Norris were rookies when they were his team-mates. Sainz arguably doesn't match Leclerc in terms of pure talent, and is yet to outqualify his team-mate over a full season – the overall score is 53-27 (including sprint qualifying) when taking out of the equation technical issues and blatant team errors, like Ferrari giving intermediate tyres to Leclerc on an almost completely dry track at the 2021 Sao Paulo Grand Prix.
However, Sainz does seem to be a somewhat more consistent driver and has been making fewer mistakes than Leclerc, especially in the last couple of years – a period of time when Sainz has also suffered few terminal technical failures on Sundays: just one in the last 45 grands prix. Leclerc hasn't been so fortunate, hence quite a small gap in terms of points scored – 850 to Leclerc, 772.5 for Sainz.
In the end, although Ferrari hasn't been as regular a frontrunner as it used to be in the Mansell and Prost era, Sainz's three wins and four qualifying-topping pole positions were no match for Leclerc or for a certain Lewis Hamilton, and team principal Frederic Vasseur seized the opportunity of hiring the seven-time world champion as soon as it arose.
Then it was about finding shelter somewhere, ideally in a top team, but Mercedes focused on the Verstappen and Andrea Kimi Antonelli options, while Red Bull doesn't seem to have any interest in its former protege despite its current drivers (with the obvious exception of Verstappen himself) struggling to various degrees.
Sainz therefore had a realistic choice between the bottom three teams in the championship, all very keen for him to join: the troubled Alpine and Sauber/Audi projects, with fluctuating management and somewhat uncertain long-term future, and Williams.
The Williams name holds a different meaning depending on your generation. For people over 40, it is a powerhouse that dominated F1 in the 1980s and the 1990s, with the likes of Prost and Mansell. Meanwhile, fans under 20 may simply view the outfit as a struggling midfielder whose illustrious past is long, long gone.
Under James Vowles, though, it is arguably an enticing project. Dorilton Capital bought the team from the Williams family when it was on the brink of bankruptcy, in the summer of 2020, and has since been investing the necessary funds – with the budget cap contributing to a more level playing field.
Vowles was appointed team principal ahead of the 2023 season and found facilities that he described as two decades out of date – with some habits that clearly startled him as he came from the successful Mercedes outfit, like using Excel spreadsheets to list thousands of car parts. The team's restructuring remains ongoing.
For Williams, replacing an underperforming Logan Sargeant was a no-brainer, and pushing to hire Sainz was the logical choice given his pedigree
Vowles also brings a management approach that is at odds with the way Frank Williams sometimes antagonised his drivers, which had led to acrimonious splits with the likes of Mansell and Damon Hill.
For Williams, replacing an underperforming Logan Sargeant was a no-brainer, and pushing to hire Sainz was the logical choice given his pedigree. Vowles even sees him as, "at times", the second best driver on the grid and someone who has a track record of leaving teams in a better position than he finds them.
Sainz, then, was unrivalled by anyone realistically available to the Grove-based team. He may not be able to say the same, but Williams is no longer the hopeless backmarker it was a few years ago. The Spaniard arguably has unfinished business with McLaren and Ferrari, and he may never be a world champion like Prost and Mansell. But, as he turns 30 later this year, he can dedicate himself to a project that could help him write history much more than he has so far: by bringing Williams back to the top.
