Carlos Sainz says Ferrari’s current situation is “clearly not good enough” after the team reverted to its older Imola aero package in an attempt to stop bouncing.
Sainz took a solid fifth place in the British GP and bagged the bonus point for fastest lap as he had a pit stop window that allowed him to take new tyres, but the red cars lagged behind Mercedes, Red Bull and McLaren all weekend.
The bouncing issues that emerged in high-speed corners with the most recent package made the car what Sainz called “undriveable”, obliging the team to return to the early spec of floor at Silverstone.
“Clearly not good enough,” said Sainz about the current situation.
“We are basically with the same car as in Imola. Since Imola, everyone has upgraded, and they’ve probably added a few tenths to the car, while we had to revert and we’ve lost two or three months there of performance gain in the wind tunnel and performance that we could have added in these three months.
“So clearly, we haven’t taken the right calls recently, but I feel like today was at least back to basics approach, back to a car that we know was okay in Imola, and we just need to upgrade it from here. But unfortunately, it’s clear that our rivals are a good step ahead of us.”
Sainz: Ferrari did the maximum with the package available
Asked if the slower Hungaroring might be more suited to the newer floor, he agreed that it might be worth the compromise.
“Yes,” he said. “It still means we will bounce in Turn 4 and 11. But until something better will come, we might need to live with the bouncing for slow speed performance, while in high-speed tracks, we might need to run this floor of the old package, if not the other one is undriveable.”
Regarding the return to high-speed in Spa he said:
“So far, the situation we’re in, I trust the team will do the right calls, circuit-to-circuit, until a more solid package – which is not bouncing in high-speed and good in low-speed – arrives. And then we will start thinking about battling the top three teams again.”
Meanwhile, Sainz felt that the team did the best with the car it had at Silverstone in a race that saw cars switch to intermediates for the damp middle stages of the race.
“I think today we did the maximum,” he said.
“I’m particularly happy with today’s race, because even if we were not fast enough in full dry or full wet conditions, we got all the pit stop calls right.
“And especially middle of the race when it was slick on wet, I managed to catch the podium places by six, seven seconds in those conditions that I always enjoy, and we put ourselves in the fight for the podium. But unfortunately, as soon as it got full wet or full dry, we were just not quick enough.”
Sainz said he had done his homework before the race: “To be honest, I had studied a lot the weather and everything with my engineers. So I was very confident going into the race that we were capable of getting the calls right today.
“We did some good runs in FP1 and FP2 to measure the conditions. And today we were fully ready, and we executed a perfect race. Honestly, all the calls were pretty much spot-on, all the tyres, all the radio calls.
“It’s just a shame that we were not faster in the first part of the race, or faster on the inters, or faster at the end, because I feel like we would have been 100% on the fight for the podium or the win today. But very happy, a bonus point at the end with fastest lap. So we need to be happy.”
He added: “It was just unfortunate that I wasn’t closer at the beginning, or closer at the end, because it’s one of the races where today I felt like could have had a good chance.”
