The team most frequently named as Carlos Sainz's escape route from Williams has spoken first, and it did not say what the rumour mill wanted.
Mattia Binotto knows Sainz well from their Ferrari years, which is precisely why Audi keeps appearing next to the Spaniard's name. Asked about it by Racingnews365, the Audi project chief acknowledged the logic and then declined it.
"First, I'm not reading the newspapers myself, or not reading much, so I'm hearing from you," he said. "Carlos is certainly a person whom I know very well, and it's somehow easy and obvious to link him to Audi, but I can only say that I'm very happy with the line-up we have."
Nico Hulkenberg and Gabriel Bortoleto are that line-up, and Binotto disliked the usual framing of it.
"Often, when discussing Gabriel and Nico, what I hear is that it is a good mix between experience and, on the other side, the young driver," he said. "Instead, I would judge them differently. They are two very fast drivers, and I am happy because they are fast drivers, both of them, so we've got a good line-up."
The speculation, in his reading, is a scoreboard of its own. "The fact that other drivers are linked to our team, I can only be very happy with because it is showing the credibility of our project is improving," Binotto said. "It is showing that the perception from the outside that one day we can become competitive is no longer a rumour, but it is a fact."
Audi, a season into its takeover of Sauber, currently sits one place and one point clear of Williams. Sainz has scored six of his team's eleven points.
Whether the 2024 choice was ever right is where the paddock divides. Martin Brundle, on Sky F1, thinks the family knew better.
"He really committed to it, didn't he?" the former driver said. "He decided not to go to Audi, which I believe his dad wanted him to. They've got a long-standing relationship there with the family with Audi. It is frustrating. He's stalling out at a time in his career and life that is not optimal, to say the least."
His verdict on where that leaves Sainz has stuck to the Spaniard all break: "I think he's ended up down a cul-de-sac here. So hopefully Williams has an answer for '27."
Brundle is no kinder about the plan behind it. "They said, 'Look, we're going to sacrifice 2025, because of the all new regulations, biggest regulation change in the history of our sport,'" he said, "but then the results haven't worked."
David Coulthard started his own grand prix career at Williams and reads the same season completely differently. On the Up To Speed podcast he put the blame on supply rather than strategy.
"They got it wrong, their car," he said. "But the mitigating circumstances, as we learn more, is that they got a lot of the information on what they were dealing with from their outside suppliers late, which meant they had to then internally adjust what they were building, and it came out late and heavy, and late and heavy is not a good thing. They missed the first test."
The decision itself he still defends. "For Carlos Sainz particularly, it must be frustrating, because he sort of juggled the do I go to Audi, do I go with Williams, and I think on paper, he made the right decision going with a British team and a team like Williams. But they'll be back."
Sainz has given no timetable of his own. "I honestly don't know. I cannot give you a date, but I imagine, as I always said, that I was going to wait until the summer to sit down with my team and think about this," he said. "Discuss with them, with James [Vowles] and everyone, the future of the team and my future in it."
Vowles has conceded his driver has the "ability" to move to "a number of other locations." Binotto has just made one of them harder to reach.