Despite losing valuable time and several places due to poor pit stops during the 2022 Formula 1 season, Scuderia Ferrari Spanish driver Carlos Sainz pointed out that much too often the pit stop crew gets the blame for the strategists’ late decisions.
The Spaniard was involved in several unfortunate moments in the pitlane this F1 campaign. The most memorable remains the Dutch Grand Prix, with a double blunder from the Italian side. At the first pit stop, the Ferrari pit crew was caught off guard and waited for Carlos with only three tyres ready, as the fourth tyre changer scrambled to get a tyre out for the rear left and bring it for the change.
Ferrari Team Principal Mattia Binotto admitted it was indeed “a mess.”
Later in the Dutch Grand Prix, at his third and last pit stop, Carlos Sainz received a penalty due to an unsafe release.
Ferrari’s pit crew received a lot of criticism for these incidents, but in reality neither moments were actually their fault: the first pit stop issue was caused by the late call made by the Ferrari strategists, as Carlos Sainz was already at the final turn. The second incident was mainly due to a McLaren mechanic forcing the Ferrari driver to wait a few moments and as a result come out just ahead of Fernando Alonso.
Yet this does not mean that there have not been times when Carlos Sainz has complained over the team radio regarding the time lost in the pit:
“It’s a very sensitive subject,” – the Ferrari driver said, in a recent interview for Spanish daily sports newspaper AS. “It seems to me that there is a lot of criticism towards the mechanics when they are the first ones who want the result to be the best possible for the team. They love Ferrari to the fullest, the same or more than the driver himself, they are super linked to Ferrari and live this passion more than any Tifosi and any journalist, but they are criticised a lot. Especially after Zandvoort, a lot of people still ask me how it was possible that a mechanic wasn’t ready, but that happens because they haven’t called him in time to be ready. A mechanic will always be there, it can be explained once again that Zandvoort’s mistake was not the mechanics, but the late call.” – the Spaniard explained, according to AS.
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At the same time, pit stops have not been the Maranello team’s sole problem this year, as both Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz could have scored better results with better strategy decisions from the Ferrari pitwall, while several power unit reliability issues also made life a lot easier for Red Bull on their way to both F1 world titles.
Carlos Sainz is confident the Italian side will be able to fix these niggles.
“With trial and error. as we have been doing this year. Making mistakes, learning, making sure it doesn’t happen again. The key to a team is not how many mistakes are made but whether the same mistake is made twice. And so far I have not seen Ferrari make the same mistake twice. They have all been different examples, strategy errors or ‘pit stops’, but they have never been repeated. It’s costing us in the championship, but I’ll be calm when the opportunity to win a championship comes and we don’t make those mistakes.” – the Spanish driver pointed out.
It is also true that the Ferrari driver also made a few mistakes in the first part of the 2022 Formula One championship, as he encountered some difficulties in adapting to the all-new F1-75 challenger:
“It frustrated me.” – Carlos Sainz admitted – “because it is not a problem that I had. I am a driver who has always adapted very quickly to the cars in which I have competed. I have always been very close to my team-mates or ahead. That the year I have had to suffer the most is the year in which I have a competitive car, in those first races, you can imagine that it was very difficult to accept psychologically. And to work on it, because I couldn’t explain it. If I’ve never had problems adapting and I’ve always been fast, why do I have trouble when I just have a fast car that allows me to fight for victories? I was very frustrated, I was worried, and I worked a lot on it. Even so, I did not lose my head and I have been able to solve it.” – the Ferrari driver concluded.
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