“You can also take something positive with you. The fact that you are in the front row with Carlos is positive,” said Ferrari team boss Frederic Vasseur after the Formula 1 race in Spain. But to be honest, there wasn’t much reason for the Scuderia to find anything positive on Sunday.
Charles Leclerc ended up outside the points, Sainz went down from second on the grid to fifth. He says: “I worked even harder today, but you can’t see that.”
“I spent the whole race managing the tires because we push them very hard,” says the Spaniard. “I couldn’t push. We just managed all the time and tried to get to a certain lap in the stints, but we still didn’t always succeed.”
Sainz came into the pits for the first time after 15 laps. For comparison: Mercedes, who had already overtaken him on the track, managed ten more laps.
But it didn’t necessarily get better for Sainz on the medium and on the hard either – on the contrary. He lost even more ground on medium and was out of contention for the top positions.
Barcelona highlights problems of the SF-23
“We’re not consistent enough from one stint to the next,” says team boss Vasseur. “We lost fifteen seconds in the second stint, five in the first and five in the third.”
Even George Russell and Sergio Perez, who started outside the top 10, overtook Sainz and pulled away from him. “Unfortunately, that’s our situation,” he says.
“We know that race pace and fast corners are our greatest weakness, and unfortunately in Barcelona there is an asphalt that causes a lot of degradation and a layout that also causes a lot of degradation. And the fast corners,” he said Sainz.
“And that’s why we had such big problems today. I gave it my all and drove the best stints I could, but unfortunately fifth place was the best I could achieve today.”
No chance at the start against Verstappen
Only once in the race did Sainz have the chance to overtake another driver and move forward: right at the start against Max Verstappen. In contrast to the drivers behind him, the world champion had strapped on the harder medium tires and was therefore at a disadvantage.
Despite this, Sainz was unable to get past Verstappen on the outside in turn 1. “I knew he was on medium tires, so maybe I had a little more grip. But he defended well and pushed me to the outside. He did what he had to do,” said the Ferrari driver. “I could have gone through the run-off zone, but I wanted to stay legal.”
In the end it probably wouldn’t have made any difference, because sooner or later the Red Bull driver would have overtaken him again.
However, Sainz denies that he had taken the soft at the start to overtake Verstappen: “We just thought it was the right tire for the first stint. And when you saw what Lewis [Hamilton] did on the soft then it was a pretty tough tire.”
“It’s not for us at the moment, but it looked like the others could push much longer and harder,” said Sainz.
Update came on “worst route”
For him, the 45-second gap is simply Ferrari’s current pace when he thinks back to Miami, where he was a similar gap. The big surprise for him was simply that Mercedes has now squeezed in between Red Bull and Ferrari.
The Silver Arrows also recently had an upgrade that seems to be working well: “Mercedes proved today that they’ve made a good step. That’s a good reference,” says Sainz. However, the new package from Ferrari, including the new side box, did not prove itself in Barcelona.
But the Spaniard doesn’t want to overstate that: “I know that the factory worked extremely hard, but it probably happened on our worst track of the season,” he says. “So I think we haven’t seen the best yet.”
“We’ve identified our weaknesses and know exactly where we’re lacking. The feedback is there, and so is the intention. But we need time and need to keep trying and keep bringing new things to improve the package. We’re doing our best . I see the team united and I see the team going full throttle at Maranello.”