F1 | “One of the most impressive things I’ve seen as a racing driver”, says Sainz about Ferrari’s reaction after the French GP
It has been an encouraging first half of the season for Scuderia Ferrari, excluding one low point: The Fench Grand Prix. Carlos Sainz still says that he is impressed by his team’s reaction to leaving Paul Ricard without points.
Ferrari struggled with some poor tyre performance during the race at Paul Ricard, where they had Charles Leclerc finish on P16 and teammate Calros Sainz P11, having them return home without points. Even though the Spaniard finished 99.3 seoonds off the leader, he said that he was impressed with how the team worked tirelessly to solve the issue when they returned to the factory in Maranello.
“Well, there’s been a lot of emphasis and focus put on this issue. The fallback in Paul Ricard was so dramatic in a way because we were all so surprised and said: ‘OK, we need to change this, and we need to tackle this as aggressive and as soon as we can’,” said the Spaniard.
“The minute that happened, we all flew back to Maranello, we put together a few meetings, a few analysis and it was two, nearly three days intense work in the simulator, in simulations, in understanding our car to see what was the issue in our car to cause this huge problem you know and – the way that the team reacted to that, was quite impressive in a way that – to see such a big team, such a big boat going to tackle in one direction all pushing in the same way to this problem, and seeing how many theories, how many projects came up to try and solve it was one of the most impressive feelings I’ve got as a racing driver, just to see such a big organisation tackling one certain issue,” he added.
Carlos had previously pointed out that the problem was an ongoing weakness with the SF21, while Leclerc added that their pace began to drop after just two laps on hard tyres, while the medium ones were degrading “very, very wuickly”, which made the italian sucderia drivers tumble out of the point scorer places.
For now, the Maranello-based team are on a streak of four consecutive points-scoring races with Sainz managing to score a podium in Hungary, while Leclerc sadly retires in Lap 1 chaos after a successful race in Silverstone.
Sainz added that Ferrari’s engineers deserve to take in the praise for their work on solving the tyre issue.
“I enjoyed it a lot, and it was a good process,” he continued. “As drivers obviously we cannot do much more than give precise feedback, precise detail of what we feel in the car, how we feel the tyres are being affected by our driving, about the balance we have and let the engineers take care of the rest. It was good fun and I enjoyed it a lot,” he said.
