Carlos Sainz reflects on Ferrari’s tough start to the season

Compared to 2022, the beginning of the season for Ferrari has not been ideal, to say the least. As the runner-up in the World Constructors’ Championship and often in contention for first place in 2022, Ferrari and its drivers hoped to at least replicate this performance, if not do better. However, the reality is quite different.

For Carlos Sainz, a lost hope

During the unveiling of the SF-23, the Ferrari drivers were happy, pleased to find a car that was already showing promise. But from the first race until Miami, the beginning of the season was more synonymous with a nightmare.

“It has been more difficult than any other year,” declared Carlos Sainz to The Race. “I had the feeling that 2022 was a bit of a comeback for Ferrari. And I feel like we all expected to fight at least at a similar level.”

Not just me, but the whole team had this hope, this expectation. And suddenly finding ourselves over half a second behind Red Bull was difficult to handle.

Carlos Sainz stunned by the gap with Red Bull

Like Mercedes and all the other teams on the grid, Carlos Sainz still doesn’t realize the advantage that Red Bull has in terms of performance. After a closely contested 2022 season, Sainz wasn’t expecting such a gap.

“The fact of being fourth in the constructors’ standings or fifth or sixth in the drivers’ standings doesn’t really hurt me, it’s rather the gap with Red Bull that hurts me,” affirms Sainz.

(D) It’s the speed of Red Bull this year that surprised us. And how it caught us off guard. We’re not the only ones, I think Mercedes and Aston Martin would have never expected such a gap between them.

If we were now fourth in the constructors’ standings, but we knew that every weekend we have a chance to get a pole position and win a race, it would be easier to accept.

Behind the wheel of his unbalanced Ferrari, Sainz still feels more comfortable

While highlighting the difficulty of piloting his SF-23, Carlos Sainz specified that compared to 2022, he feels more confident and is able to tame this race car.

At the moment, we are struggling a bit with unpredictability, with a very delicate car, which makes the sequencing of laps in qualifying, the race pace, changing conditions, tire wear, the wind, very, very tricky to predict and very tricky to adapt.

(D) Besides that, I feel like I understand how I should drive this generation of cars, I understand how I want to set up the car to my liking, or at least this generation of cars to my liking. And that leaves me with fewer variables to consider before a race weekend,” declared the Spanish driver.

I have the feeling that even if the car may be even more delicate than last year, I understand it better. And I can adjust and drive the car my way.

An important job in Maranello to bounce back

To catch up on the delay with Red Bull and get back into the race for victory, the work on the car at Maranello is more than necessary, and already in progress.

“The amount of work in progress in Maranello with the development plan is enormous. The most difficult part is trying to ensure that the entire factory is aligned and motivated for the next stage,” stated Sainz.

The key is development. Already started with an update in Miami regarding the floor and diffuser, the development should continue during the European Grand Prix, notably in Spain. Faced with this, Carlos Sainz prefers to remain calm: Ferrari knows its weaknesses and should be able to remedy them.

After the first races, we also identified very clear weaknesses in our package, even compared to last year.

That’s why I am quite calm, because I feel like we have identified the weaknesses compared to last year, but also that we have an idea of the direction we need to take in development, he said.