With a podium finish in Baku, Carlos Sainz has entered an exclusive Formula 1 list that previously only included Alain Prost
With his third place for Williams at the 2025 Azerbaijan Grand Prix in Baku, Carlos Sainz has achieved something that only one other driver has managed before him: He has stood on the podium for each of the three traditional Formula 1 teams: Ferrari, McLaren, and Williams.
Sainz now shares this achievement with four-time world champion Alain Prost—and even in the same order: both first achieved top-three results for McLaren, then stood on the podium for Ferrari, and finally made it onto the podium for Williams.
But that’s where the similarities between Sainz and Prost end, because while Prost won for all three teams and even became world champion for McLaren and Williams, Sainz has only achieved race victories for Ferrari so far.
What Prost did even better than Sainz
Prost can easily surpass that with a special statistic:
The French racing driver won for McLaren, Ferrari, and Williams on his first finish – only at Ferrari was it not in his first race, but in his second.
Unlike Sainz, Prost was already a Formula 1 winner before he joined McLaren. It was only at McLaren that Sainz achieved his first top-three finish in Formula 1.
Nigel Mansell could have been the third, but …
Prost’s Williams predecessor Nigel Mansell almost made it into this photo gallery, as he also competed for the three traditional teams Ferrari, McLaren, and Williams (among others) during his Formula 1 career – and only failed to win for McLaren.
Mansell’s time at McLaren was a complete failure: as 1992 world champion, Mansell returned to Williams as a replacement driver in 1994 after Ayrton Senna’s death and won the season finale in Adelaide. But at McLaren in 1995, he didn’t fit in the car and missed the first two races until McLaren had made modifications.
After finishing tenth in Imola and retiring in Barcelona, Mansell drew a line under his career: he quit and never returned to Formula 1 as a regular driver.
