Scuderia Ferrari Spanish driver Carlos Sainz is confident the Maranello team will be able to “make things more complicated” for Red Bull and Max Verstappen if the Italian side’s 2023 F1 car will be a strong evolution of the F1-75 challenger and if he starts the 2023 Formula 1 championship as he finished the 2022 campaign.
Scuderia Ferrari started the 2022 season with two race victories from the first three events, but it was Charles Leclerc who took the Maranello team on the top spots in Bahrain and Australian, while Carlos Sainz struggled a bit more in the early stages of 2022 as he got to grips with the new generation of cars.
Unfortunately, by the time the Spaniard understood how to get the most out of his F1-75 single-seater, Red Bull and Max Verstappen were well on their way to winning both titles due to a series of operation issues and reliability issues for the Italian side. Carlos Sainz is confident he can avoid the slow start from this season and put pressure on Red Bull and Max Verstappen from the early stages of the 2023 Formula 1 championship. And he feels he can do so next year by building on the strong form he left off in 2022.
“You never expect that, especially when you have a good car at the beginning,” Carlos Sainz replied when asked about Max Verstappen’s record of victories – “I wish now that I would have felt a bit more comfortable at the beginning of the season to make things also a bit more complicated to Max and, together with Charles, put a bit more of a fight. But Max has done an amazing season, he deserves it. I think they are dominant now, I think now the Red Bull is starting to be a dominant car, but at the beginning of the season, for sure [it was] not, and that is where he did a tremendous job.” – the Ferrari man pointed out.+
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“My target is next year to start at the level that I am now, which is a pretty decent level, and make things more complicated to Max.” – the Spaniard added.
While acknowledging the performance and good work done by Red Bull Racing with their RB18 challenger, Carlos Sainz does not feel that defeating the Austrian side next year is an impossible achievement:
|New year, new car, new regs even with the floor… We have another chance and I fully trust that the team will produce another great car like the car that we had this year and that we will learn from the mistakes done this year. I will learn from the mistakes I did this year and we will be more in the fight and ready to fight. I’m looking forward also for Merc; It looks like they’re going to join us at the front.” – Carlos Sainz concluded.
Frederic Vasseur is the figure responsible for bringing Scuderia Ferrari back at the top, with the French manager replacing Mattia Binotto as Ferrari team principal starting with 2023.
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