Carlos Sainz admits “new Ferrari aerodynamic package is clearly worse”. For Carlos Sainz, the focus is all on the 'wrong' updates..

Expected Difficulty

Carlos Sainz will start from the fourth row tomorrow in the British GP, which in 2022 gave him his first career victory in very controversial circumstances. However, the reality for Ferrari is now quite different: in qualifying, Carlos Sainz was the only Ferrari driver to make it into Q3, and his seventh-place grid position, even behind Nico Hulkenberg’s Haas, does not bode well for tomorrow.

Speaking to various media and in the mixed zone of the British circuit, Carlos Sainz showed his usual realism and awareness of the situation, not showing surprise at the team’s poor result: “There is no surprise – commented the Madrid native – since we have recently struggled on high-speed tracks. We knew that coming to the queen of high-speed tracks would give us a difficult weekend. Returning to Imola specifications? It didn’t give us any extra performance – stated Carlos Sainz – it only gave us a bit more consistency at high speeds, as we have a bit less bouncing. We needed to make the car as consistent or predictable as possible at high speeds.”

Bouncing, an Unresolved Issue

The issue of bouncing is more complex than it might appear from the outside. Sainz explained that this is an inherent flaw of the SF-24, and the problem with the most recent upgrades is that they essentially exacerbated it: “From the beginning of the year, we have had bouncing problems. This is still an intrinsic weakness of the car, but the new update was clearly worse than the old one, so for Silverstone, we decided to keep the old one.”

Concluding his analysis, Carlos Sainz dismissed the idea that rain could improve the situation – partially contradicting Charles Leclerc – and passed the responsibility to the Ferrari engineers, expressing confidence in their ability to turn around the current crisis: “I believe the direction to follow is clear – concluded Sainz – but it is necessary to understand if we can bring it to the track and give us what we need. I think we can; we proved it last year when we made very good developments throughout the year. We proved it again over the winter when we made this car clearly more consistent and better. But certainly, the recent steps have not been what we expected.” – Carlos Sainz concluded at the end of the qualifying session for the British Grand Prix at the Silverstone circuit.