Scuderia Ferrari Spanish driver Carlos Sainz is sitting in his new home close to the Maranello factory and reflecting happily on his first six months as a driver for Formula 1’s most famous team.
“I’ve found it really cool,” he says in an exclusive interview with BBC Sport. “First of all, you go into this team kind of making a dream come true. So there is a lot of excitement and a lot of nervousness before doing your first race, your first test. But I have managed to keep that nervousness on the positive side and I am actually enjoying a lot the process of coming to live in Italy, spending a lot of time in Maranello, a lot of time in the factory, getting to know the whole Ferrari history and what surrounds it. Getting to know the culture also, and just embracing the challenge and trying to maximise it.” – he explained.
The 26-year-old Spaniard has every reason for his sunny mood – his move has gone rather well so far.
Carlos Sainz has not usually been the fastest driver in a Ferrari this season, but that’s no surprise since his team-mate is the extravagantly talented Charles Leclerc.
But he has played a significant role in Ferrari’s revival, pushed Charles Leclerc hard all the way, and scored the team’s best result so far – second place at the Monaco Grand Prix.
Carlos Sainz has also been the most impressive driver to have joined a new team in 2021.
While Sebastian Vettel at Aston Martin, Fernando Alonso at Alpine, and Daniel Ricciardo at McLaren have all toiled to one degree or another, Sainz has looked comfortable and at ease within Ferrari from the start.
Within F1, there were those who worried for Sainz when he made the decision to leave McLaren, where he had been highly impressive alongside Lando Norris, to join Ferrari.
Leclerc had just signed a new contract until 2024 and Ferrari saw him as the man who would lead their challenge for the next half-decade and possibly more.
Leclerc had earned that position by beating Vettel, a four-time champion, on every possible metric in his first season with the team. For some, Sainz was consigning himself to a support role. Was it a wise move, they wondered, when he had just had the most impressive year of his career in a McLaren team clearly enjoying a renaissance?
But Sainz is made of sterner stuff than that. He had wanted to join Ferrari since he was a 10-year-old boy and visited the team’s garage at the Spanish Grand Prix, and he admits there was “definitely a bit of romanticism” in his decision to move. But he went into it with his eyes open.
“Obviously I did think about it,” Sainz says. “When you sign a deal, you consider all these options, but immediately as I started to have my first conversations with Mattia [Binotto, the team principal] and everyone, I realised that I was going to have equal opportunity.
“So [I thought] maybe my first year in the team is going to be challenging to match Charles’ results. But I rely a lot on my talents and my work ethic and the way I approach things and even if the first year is going to be tough, I am expecting in the future to be close to him or even hopefully a bit ahead.
“Once I knew they were going to let me perform at my highest level without putting any barriers to it, for me it was a no-brainer – because we are athletes, we are self-confident, we all believe we are the best and I’m just waiting to get a bit better, a bit more at home with the team to try to perform at a higher level.”
In fact, he says, the opportunity to gauge himself against Leclerc was part of the appeal.
“If you want to test your qualifying speed against anyone, it is against Charles Leclerc,” Sainz says. “I think he is the best qualifier on the grid. He is one of the greatest if not the greatest talent in Formula 1 now, and I am actually getting to learn now why he is performing at such a high level.
“It is not only speed. He also has a very good work ethic, he is very good at team building, he has a lot of strengths that make him such a strong driver.
“I am loving the challenge, to be honest, because I know there is no one better than him probably as a single lap with a Ferrari Formula 1 car.”
Sainz has been a team-mate of Max Verstappen, who is competing for this year’s world title with Lewis Hamilton. Is he saying he thinks Leclerc is the out-and-out fastest driver in F1?
“I wouldn’t say Formula 1,” he says. “I don’t know Lewis. I know Max, I know Lando.
“I would say right now if you put any driver in a Ferrari car, it will be difficult [for them] to out-qualify Charles, because he has that three years’ experience, he knows exactly how to pull out a lap in Q3 [the final part of qualifying] with this car, he knows exactly what the car does and he has the talent to extract that performance with a Ferrari.
“Then, if you want to go and beat Max in the Red Bull it would be very complicated, and Lewis in the Mercedes and Lando in the McLaren – guys that are performing at their best with a car because they have the experience with that car.”
Leclerc has had the upper hand so far in his battle with Sainz. He is five-one ahead in their qualifying head-to-head, at an average advantage of 0.233secs, and leads by 10 points in the championship despite the technical failure that prevented him starting at Monaco, when he was on pole position.
But the competition has been closer than those raw statistics suggest. Sainz has a number of times been the pace-setter through a weekend, only for Leclerc to pull something special out of the bag in qualifying. And Sainz’s pace so early in his Ferrari career has been one of the most striking aspects of the season.
Sainz came to Ferrari after two years of being neck-and-neck with Norris, whose talent he describes as “very special”.
The good-natured and amusing badinage between Sainz and Norris was a key feature of their partnership. It was real – they genuinely enjoyed each other’s company – but there was a degree of calculation about it, too. And the same goes for Sainz and Leclerc. Sainz sees no need for animosity or unpleasantness with a rival or team-mate.
“Inside the craziness of any Formula 1 driver,” Sainz says, “I try to be a bit pragmatic, a bit philosophical about the whole thing and I try to take things easy, especially with team-mates.
“There tends to be a lot of competition with team-mates and I am the first one who wants to finish ahead of Charles in every race, in every qualifying.
“But at the moment in Ferrari there is a priority number one that is to take the team forward as quick as possible back to the top. And having that priority in mind probably you don’t give the relationship with the team-mate as much importance. Maybe you take away 1% of importance from it, which is still important.
“He’s a great guy. I enjoy working with him outside of the car. We have very similar passions outside motorsports. We share a lot of hobbies, we talk a lot about them and we play a lot of sport outside Formula 1 and it makes the relationship a bit more relaxed.
“The fact that you can get on well with the team-mate outside the car, it makes the relationship inside the car also a bit more relaxed.”
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