Scuderia Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz reflected on his second season with the outfit, and said that he feels that the team has the potential to battle for the title this season, given they improve upon weak points from 2022 and make further gains in pace.
According to Formula1.com, Sainz said that the beginning of the year was difficult as he had trouble coming to grips with the new-regulation 2022 car. However, he was able to move forward as the season went on and find good pace, though he suffered several retirements due to technical issues and incidents.
“Yeah, it’s been a challenging [year], as you guys have seen from the outside. There was a challenging first third of the season where I struggled a bit with the car balance, with the driving style, a car that for some reason didn’t suit me straight out of the box, and I had to fight through it quite a lot.”
“And the second two-thirds, I have been a lot happier with the car. I’ve been a lot more on the pace, but unfortunately, a lot of DNFs, a lot of reliability issues along the way.”
By the time he became well acclimated with the car, the lead was firmly in the hands of Red Bull, and Mercedes was able to catch up to the frontrunners pace-wise. With this, he felt that he wasn’t able to achieve results representative of his improvement– but hopes that he’ll be able to keep up the momentum into 2023.
“On top of that, it looks like Mercedes and Red Bull did have a better second half of the season. And it means that even though I’m up to speed with a car and I’m driving well, and I had a solid weekend, for example, in Mexico, the maximum I could get was a P5.”
“So, a bit unfortunate in that regard. But I’ve learned a lot. I’m proud of the progress I’ve done inside the car, with my engineers, the way that we managed to turn my pace around. And yeah, I’ll make sure next year we are back to being the consistent Carlos of 2021 and get good results.”
Sainz said that Ferrari weren’t at the level of Red Bull when it came to pace and driver performance, but feels that with a “perfect” season they might be able to compete for the title. Sainz said that the car would need to make significant gains, and that he would have to start the season off stronger than he did this year.
“Clearly [last] year, it wasn’t [possible], because I’m very far from [Max Verstappen] in the championship. And the way that he has performed in combination with Red Bull, they’ve been just the faster package: the quicker car; the quicker driver.”
“I do feel like with a perfect year, it should be possible, but we will need to be perfect next year and we will need to improve the car. I will need to improve, especially in the first half of the season and in the races. So, that is the target and you need to put high targets to yourself, and onto the team like this. You can try and accomplish them. And then let’s see what life brings [this] year.”
