According to Scuderia Ferrari Spanish driver Carlos Sainz, the Maranello team’s disappointment in the start of the 2023 Formula One championship stems not so much from their fourth-place position in the Constructors’ Championship ahead of the Monaco Grand Prix, but rather from their significant performance gap as compared to Red Bull on the track.
Having achieved several victories and stood atop the podium many times during the previous championship, with Scuderia Ferrari emerging as the closest competitors to Red Bull, the Italian side entered this year’s Formula 1 championship with high expectations of continuing their success from the first part of the 2022 campaign.
However, they discovered that their SF-23 single-seater is characterized by its volatility, unpredictability, and challenging handling which made things very difficult for Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz in the first five races this year. The car’s behavior during qualifying differs significantly from its performance over longer distances on Sunday, making it a demanding and complex car to drive for the Ferrari men.
“It’s not an easy car,” Carlos Sainz explained in a recent interview for ‘The Race’ when asked about the Maranello team’s car for the 2023 Formula 1 season – “At the moment, we are struggling a bit with unpredictability, with a very tricky car, which makes putting laps together in qualy, race pace, changing conditions, tyre wear, wind, very, very tricky to predict and very tricky to adapt to. As a driver, leaving that aside, I feel like I understand how I need to drive this generation of cars, I understand how I want to set up the car to my liking, or at least this generation of cars to my liking. And that leaves me with less variables to think about going into a race weekend.” – he added.
“It hasn’t been an easy start, as I said, but I feel like even if the car is possibly even trickier than last year, I understand that trickiness better. And I can set-up and drive the car in my way.” – Carlos Sainz continued.
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The lack of speed exhibited by the SF-23 challenger, as well as the rest of the field, has created a big opportunity for the Austrian side to dominate the championship, with Max Verstappen leading Sergio Perez by a margin of 14 points.
Having achieved five victories out of five races in this start of the 2023 F1 season, including four instances of a 1-2 finish, there have been suggestions that the Red Bull team could potentially secure a clean sweep of victories this year, winning all 22 races and effortlessly clinching both championship title for the second consecutive year.
Carlos Sainz, currently occupying the fifth position in the Drivers’ standings with 44 points, finds himself trailing Max Verstappen by a significant 75-point gap. For now, his primary focus remains on achieving his first podium finish of the season, let alone a race victory. Meanwhile, Ferrari holds the fourth position in the teams’ battle, but they find themselves 146 points adrift from the leading pace and can only hope to win the duel for P2 against Red Bull and Mercedes.
“It doesn’t hurt me so much being fourth in Constructors’ or fifth or sixth in Drivers’,” Carlos Sainz insists. “It hurts me more the gap to Red Bull. If now we would be sitting fourth in the Constructors’, but we know that every weekend we have a chance to make a pole and win a race, it would be easier to accept. It’s just how fast the Red Bull has turned out to be this year. And how it has struck us by surprise. Not only us, I think Mercedes and Aston Martin would never expect to have the gap they do.” – the Spaniard pointed out.
He added: “It’s realistic to say Red Bull has achieved a level of performance that it’s very difficult to achieve just by making an evolution of our car. They have something wider, they have something deeper conceptually than all of us. But after the first few races, we’ve also identified very clear weaknesses of our package, even in relation to last year. And it’s this combination of two things that we are now focusing very hard with. That’s why I’m quite calm about it, because I feel like we’ve identified the weaknesses compared to last year from ourselves but also we have an idea of which direction we need to follow in the development.” – Scuderia Ferrari Spanish driver Carlos Sainz concluded.
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