Carlos Sainz criticizes excessive and complex F1 rules amid Norris – Verstappen incident. Carlos Sainz on last week's key episode in Austria between Lando Norris and Max Verstappen.

His first F1 victory two years ago
Excluding the 2021 season, his first driving for Ferrari, Carlos Sainz has won a race in every season spent with the Prancing Horse. In 2022, which also marked his first success in Formula 1, he won at Silverstone, where Formula 1 will hold its third consecutive GP after Barcelona and Spielberg. Two years after that victory, the Spaniard highlighted the difficulties of the SF-24, a car that has almost nothing in common with the F1-75: “This year’s car is better everywhere – he explained – as always in this sport, it’s relative to the competition. The 2022 car was much slower than the 2024 one, but for what we had at the time, it was very fast compared to the Red Bulls, Mercedes, and especially the McLarens. Now, even though the 2024 car is much faster than the 2022 one, it feels like we lost the 2022 car because it was more competitive compared to others, but this car is much more complete compared to the 2022 one.”

The updates and the new Ferrari package

Focusing exclusively on the present, Carlos Sainz emphasized some difficulties that do not exclusively concern Ferrari, such as introducing new updates: “It’s much more difficult for the teams, 100% – he stated – it’s already very difficult for the driver to understand how to extract performance from these cars. In some corners, you feel like you can push flat out, while in others you need to control your driving style and be very disciplined in how you drive the car to find lap time. For the engineers, it’s very similar. I think everyone on this grid, sooner or later, has struggled with these updates.” To this comment, #55 added his thoughts on the new package brought by Ferrari: “Surely this new package still has potential to optimize, but in the short term, we want to understand if we have taken a step in the right direction or not, because this will also help future development. This is the real priority for the team. We accept and realize that after Barcelona, we have been less competitive compared to before Barcelona and this obviously raises some concerns about the package and we certainly need to try to understand as much as possible everything that is involved and we want to do this exercise in the future. But at the same time, others are not standing still and are progressing exponentially. So we are trying to keep up with them.”

Too many rules even for Carlos Sainz
Inevitably, or almost, Carlos Sainz’s point of view on last week’s key episode in Austria between Lando Norris and Max Verstappen, with the contact between the two a few laps from the checkered flag costing both the victory. A rather brief opinion, unlike his thoughts on the current rules in Formula 1, already contested by other ‘colleagues’: “In my opinion, it’s clear that you can move to defend and then go back, but always leaving a car’s width to the white line so that the other car can fit in. This is the rule, but I can’t stand the fact that we have to keep adding rules. I think there are already too many. If you read the regulations, you can understand what to do if you overtake inside, what to do if you defend inside, what to do if you attack outside, what to do if you attack and defend from the outside. It’s a series of rules, already very detailed and specific, that I struggle to follow exactly when I’m in the car and going 300 km/h because you can’t think at that speed about all these rules. So yes, I don’t want more rules. The rules are quite clear, and there has already been a decision by the stewards. So there’s not much to talk about.” – the Spanish driver pointed out.

Thanks to Flavio Briatore
In conclusion, Carlos Sainz expressed his gratitude to Flavio Briatore for his words about him, demonstrating Alpine’s interest in having him on the team next season: “Thank you very much to Flavio for the kind words and especially from someone like him who understands this sport and has been here for a while and has seen, I believe, quite a few drivers in his career. So yes, I feel good about these words. Thank you.” – the Ferrari driver concluded ahead of the British Grand Prix.