Part One: Fernando Alonso, Franco Colapinto and Carlos Sainz.

We have two Spaniards and one Argentine with us. Can we start, please, by talking about Sunday night, that World Cup final? Who'd like to start? Carlos, perhaps you could give us your thoughts.
Carlos Sainz: My thoughts on Spain winning? I don't know, I always had the feeling it was Spain that was going to win it, given the way they had been playing the whole championship. I don't know, but I had a feeling that it was Spain's to win, and I'm very glad they did. I think they deserved it. I think they played the best football of any team in the World Cup. Happy, very proud to be a Spaniard, proud to see them celebrate and proud to see them succeed. I think it was a great event. The World Cup itself went great in the US, Mexico and Canada, so I think it was a great event. It's still only football. Life goes on. It's a World Cup match, we're world champions, it's great, but people take football so personally that sometimes it's crazy to see how passionate people are about it. I enjoyed it, had fun watching, great win, and life continues and everything moves on.

Franco Colapinto: Yeah, tough, of course. I think Spain, they really played the best football, as Carlos said, all World Cup, so they are clearly the deserved winners. But I'm very proud of the team, very proud of Argentina, of Messi and of all the players from our country. I think we all in Argentina feel very well represented by them, the way that they played and the way that they defend the shirt. Very proud to be Argentinian. Of course, life continues, but it's kind of the last few matches of a generation that gave us a lot of happiness and a lot of very good moments. It's just those moments that sometimes happen in football. They are two countries that were always very close to each other, and it was a great final to watch and a great final to be Latino. To have a final between two Spanish-speaking countries was amazing, but then it just creates all these differences. The things that a sport like football creates, they seem massive enemies now. With Messi playing for Barcelona, he gave Spain so many happy moments, and it finished being pretty bad and seemed like a war between one country and another. I don't like to see that. Football, being the most watched sport in the world, it's not nice to see that and to show that. Of course, he didn't give Madrid a lot of happy moments, but just to see them burning a shirt of Messi and these kinds of things... Luckily, it didn't burn, the shirt of God doesn't burn! In general, it was not so nice to see. Football creates these kinds of things that F1 doesn't, and I don't enjoy that. But yeah, worthy winners. Hopefully they get a bit more creative with the songs for the next World Cup. It's a bit boring.

Fernando Alonso: Not much more to add. I only watched the football game and I did enjoy it. Obviously, I think Spain played a great tournament, and not only this one. I think all the Spaniards are very proud of the national team, winning three Euros and two World Cups in the last 20 years, or something like that, I read. It seems that in football, also the women, we are world champions as well, so there are a couple of good things that probably the country is doing in football. It's great to see the whole country celebrating. I think football unites everyone, and we all celebrate. When we saw the images of Madrid, the people celebrating on the streets, people in Barcelona waving Spanish flags, sometimes we have that problem also in Spain with different regions being very proud of our own flag, but then football unites everything and we are very proud to be Spanish. So yes, great, and in four years we go again.

Fernando, just staying with you on the topic of Formula 1, describe the sense of anticipation inside the team ahead of this weekend, where you'll be driving the upgraded car for the first time.
FA: I don't think that it changes anything in the approach that we've had so far this year. We go to every race trying to maximise what we have in our hands. We're here to win races and to fight for championships. We didn't start the season that way, and we will not be that way either, because we are just in the process of understanding these regulations and getting onto a good path, let's say, with the development of the car. I think for the first 12 races, all the teams opted for a different strategy, the more conventional one, to bring two or three tenths of a second every two or three races, and then you end up with one second or one and a half seconds by race 10 or race 12. We didn't do that, so we fell a little bit behind everyone else on the grid, and now we will try to catch up all at once. But I think it doesn't change your natural position at the end on Sundays. I'm obviously optimistic. I'm very proud of the team and of the job that they've done since the Bahrain test, when we understood that we had a problem and we had to fix a few weaknesses on the car. I think this is the first step towards those fixes, but there are more to come.

How much of a step forward are you expecting here?
FA: Difficult to say. I'm not thinking too much about numbers, positions or something like that, because if we go back to the last five races, I think we had very different gaps to the midfield. We had a more or less consistent gap to pole position, which is unreachable, obviously, at this moment, but there were a couple of tough circuits. I think Silverstone was tough. Spa was one of the toughest. I think we had the guy in front of us 2.1 seconds ahead, so there is no package in the world that will give you that amount of time. Probably the position would not change if you ran the updated car in Spa one week ago, so that's how we need to treat it. It will change circuit by circuit. Hopefully Budapest is a friendly circuit for us. Power is not the most important point here, which obviously helps. We will update the car, but not the engine yet, so we still have something that we need to overcome. As I said, I'm more interested in understanding the direction of the car, whether we are on a good path and whether we finally unlock the performance.

Questions From The Floor

(David Croft - Sky Sports F1) It's a question for you, Fernando. Apologies, Franco and Carlos. Adrian Newey made a comment a couple of weeks ago that maybe the team hadn't listened to the drivers as much as it should have done. I don't know whether you agree with that, but now that we are all listening, what would your advice be, in terms of the way the season has been for Aston Martin and the way that you need to turn around what is now a major deficit?
FA: I don't know, I think to Adrian's comments, they were more about the past. This year... I think in the past it's true that we sometimes had different opinions during the race weekends in terms of the feeling and weaknesses of the car. When we were racing with other cars, what we felt behind the wheel, and sometimes when you go back to the factory and see the data, you discover things and misbehaviour on the aero that maybe were pointing the direction of the car in two different ways. Maybe the data was the winner in those debates. I think Adrian is the type of designer who listens to both sides: data, for sure, but also what the drivers feel. Formula 1 is a very complex sport, probably, and very dynamic. It changes every lap. You never have the same fuel load, you never have the same tyre age, you never have the same wind conditions, whether you are following a car or whether you are alone on track. There are many different things that can affect the balance of the car. That's why data is not 100% the truth. I think you need to combine both things, and Adrian has the best experience in the world to design a car and to develop a car. I think we are on a good path.

(Rui Chagas - DAZN Portugal) First of all, Fernando and Carlos, congratulations on being world champions. I always knew it would be either you or Portugal, 100%. Franco, I'm sorry for that. Carlos, a question for you. It's a bit of a harsh one. After the end of last year, did you ever expect, before the summer this year, to have only six points?
CS: No, it wasn't in my plans or in my expectations. I think I've been very open and very clear about the fact that I think in 2025 we overdelivered and, if anything, the results were better than what I expected when I signed my Williams contract in 2024. The 2025 car was a very good car, a car that was sometimes only three or four tenths off pole position, a car where you could feel that the balance was good. Obviously, going into 2026, I expected, if anything, with more time to develop the 2026 car and a new set of regulations, that we could potentially either stay where we were or make a small step forward. Yet time has proven to me that it has obviously been the opposite, or the other way around, and that as a team we are further away from the top than we thought we were at the end of 2025. It's definitely been a character-building year for the whole team, a bit of an eye-opener in terms of how much work there is still to do if we even want to consider fighting with a top team in the future. A lot of things have been learned, a lot of things we've realised, and unfortunately it has been a bad year so far. We need to conclude and understand why and what happened. I think we have a pretty good understanding by now. The capacity to turn it around is there, but obviously in Formula 1 it takes time. It takes time, effort, budget-cap money and a lot of analysis, and that's exactly where we are right now.

(Mariana Becker - TV Globo Brazil) Fernando, in two races, this race and Zandvoort, you're going to have a completely new car in your hands. Which signs are you expecting to see that would give you hope that the team can unlock the potential of the car and you can have a better life next year? What are you going to see that would give you the answers that you need?
FA: I don't think that I need answers. I think I have a pretty clear picture of the team, that we will fix all the problems. They take time, but I have no doubts, zero doubts, that Adrian will provide the best car on the grid sooner or later. As I said before, I would like to see the first step with this package, with the understanding after the first couple of races, and I think there's going to be more to come next year, that's for sure, and in the years to come. On the power unit, I have no doubt as well. I think it's a matter of time before Honda fixes the issues, because it's what they've been doing for the last 40 years of racing. We started on the back foot, yes. We are dealing with that process now and that pain on the weekends, but we are all working together to fix the issues. It's just how soon the car will be competitive. That's the question mark. Maybe the next two races will give us a little bit of a feeling for that. For me, I'm relaxed. As I've said many times, I'm thinking about what I need to do next year and in the years to come. I feel fresh, I feel motivated, I feel fast, but I need to enjoy what I do as well. As I said in Spa, I think the Silverstone Grand Prix and Spa were not fun to drive. I think it's not fun to watch, it's not fun to drive, and we've been repeating the same thing every single Grand Prix. It's not to criticise anything. It's just to improve the sport altogether. I think the direction that we took this year, from the driver's side, I don't know about the spectator's side, but behind the cockpit it's not the same adrenaline that I used to have driving a Formula 1 car. That's something that I need to put on the table. It's not a problem with the competitiveness of the team. It's just a problem of whether Formula 1 gives me the adrenaline that I need to live.