Carlos Sainz in brutal Williams swipe over Brazilian GP blunder - 'Worst I've ever seen'

Carlos Sainz described Williams' sprint qualifying as 'the worst execution I have seen in my life'. The Spaniard finished last in Friday's timed session, setting him up for a frustrating sprint race at the Brazilian Grand Prix.

Sainz's weekend thus far has been a tumultuous one. The four-time Grand Prix winner missed Thursday's media duties through illness but recovered in time to return to the cockpit in FP1 on Friday. In the sprint shootout, the No.55 Williams team were unable to finish ahead of any of their rivals.

The 31-year-old made a mistake at Turn One on his critical flying lap but was unimpressed with the team's management of his out laps and pit lane release timings. "This is the worst execution..." he ranted on the radio after his SQ1 elimination. "The worst execution I have seen in my life."

Delving into the disappointment after the session, he told the media: "We just simply didn't do a good quali. I mean, first run was quite messy with traffic, and problems with getting the tyres up to temperature.

"But then the second run, we managed to make our life even more difficult, and we almost didn't put two laps in. So yeah, in general, just, I go out of this qualy without knowing what was the limit or the performance of the car, because we didn't even do two laps."

Sainz also explained that he wasn't fully fit behind the wheel, but stopped short of using his illness as an excuse for his early sprint shootout exit. The Madrid-born racer will now look ahead to Saturday's qualifying session to salvage his Brazilian GP weekend.

"I'm physically obviously not 100 per cent," he confessed. "But the pace in FP1 shows that I could have done a fast lap today, if needed, but we managed to put ourselves in a position to never complete a fast lap, so it's impossible to know what we could have done."

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Sainz will now start from the pit lane after Williams opted to change his set-up for the sprint race. His Williams team-mate, Alex Albon, fared marginally better, but the Thai-British racer was still unable to challenge the top 10 positions. He will start 12th, one spot behind seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton.

"I think we knew we were going to struggle a bit at this circuit," Alex admitted. "There's a lot of lap time just in getting the balance of the car right, but I don't know if it's totally achievable. I don't know if it's a little bit more fundamental in the car. However, we'll try and fix it between the Sprint and qualifying tomorrow.

" It was tricky but I don't think we're in a bad place. The positives are that we improved the car a lot from practice to Sprint qualifying, and we're heading in the right direction."