Scuderia Ferrari Spanish driver Carlos Sainz is aware that the consequences of failing to finish a race are more severe in the 2022 Formula One season, given the fact that Ferrari has returned to the front of the grid and can now fight for race wins and hopefully the world titles.
Last season, which was the first F1 campaign of Carlos Sainz with the Maranello team, the Spanish driver finished ahead of his team-mate Charles Leclerc, but things have somehwat changed in this start of the 2022 championship. While Scuderia Ferrari won the duel with McLaren for third place in 2021, this year the Italian side has returned to the front of the grid and wants to continue challenging Red Bull for wins, but Charles Leclerc was able to better exploit the potential of the F1-75 car as compared to Carlos Sainz.
Charles Leclerc started the 2022 F1 campaign with a splendid win in Bahrain, followed by a solid second place finish in Saudi Arabia and a dominant victory in the Australian Grand at the Albert Park Circuit, while Carlos Sainz had to settle for two podium finishes in the first two races, followed by a very poor weekend in Melbourne, as he crashed out on the second lap and didn’t score any points.
If Ferrari are to remain the pacesetters, Carlos Sainz is aware there is no room for mistakes from him or the Maranello team, because such incidents will carry more severe punishments than in the last few seasons: “Charles is driving very well, he has understood this car very well and he’s doing great things with it,” Carlos Sainz said – “Of course it’s a great car, but I also believe he’s putting together some very strong races and very strong performances. I was excited about qualy and the race, just to see how much progress I had made. But unfortunately it didn’t happen. There was always going to be one race when things didn’t go my way and when I would end up doing a mistake. So now the important thing is to learn from. The important thing is just to come back to try and be more perfect and try to look into every single detail more because, with the car we have this year, I feel like every race you don’t finish, you will lose a lot of points you could have scored.” – he explained.
Carlos Sainz had to start the Australian Grand Prix from ninth place after being unable to complete his first fast run due to the red flags following Fernando Alonso’s crash. After that, an issue with the car’s starter meant he could not prepare his fast lap and therefore could not achieve the tyre temperature required for a perfect final run.
The race start then went horribly wrong for the Spaniard, who again encountered a problem, this time with a late steering wheel change on the grid which he realized was not optimally set up for the start. This led to him losing several more places after the first lap. Carlos then tried to recover as much as possible and went too hot into Turn 9, slid over the grass and got beached in the gravel at Turn 10, which meant race over.
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Carlos Sainz was asked to comment on the events in the Australian Grand Prix and if it had been the worst weekend of his Formula 1 career but while probably among the most disappointing, he felt actually he and the F1-75 were gelling nicely before things went bad in Q3. The Spaniard then pointed out the need to be more perfect in the races ahead, with 20 more events to go in the 2022 Formula 1 season and all to play for:
“I don’t remember exactly my other 100-and-something races in F1 so it’s tricky to know if it’s the worst one, but it’s definitely a weekend that looked like it was going well. It looked like I was a lot more at home with the car and putting together some strong laps during the weekend. And all of a sudden, everything turned out to be probably just one of my most disappointing weekends. I’m not going to neglect it. The important thing is I learn from it, that we also learn as a team from it, to be more perfect, more strong, more robust in all of the aspects. And keeping in mind that with 20 races to go, anything can happen. We can only use the weekend as a booster to make sure we learn from it and we have a more perfect 20 races left.” – Carlos Sainz concluded.
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