Carlos Sainz: People sometimes underestimate my speed

Two races before the end of the championship, Carlos Sainz is in 6th place in the individual standings: he has almost half as many points as the leader, Max Verstappen, who already secured his second title, but he also loses to his partner, Charles Leclerc, with more than 60 points.

However, the Spanish Ferrari driver is doing better in the second half of the season than at the start of the year when he couldn’t find an approach to the F1-75 car. At Silverstone, he won pole position for the first time in his career, before winning the British Grand Prix.

In qualifying, Carlos clearly improved and after Silverstone he was four times ahead of his partner: in Hungary, Belgium, the US and Mexico. If we measure the average difference in qualifying results between Sainz and Leclerc over this period, the Monegask still remains ahead, but his lead has been reduced to 0.013 seconds, which is quite a bit compared to the start of the season.

“I’m a realist and I know how well Charles is doing in qualifying,” Sainz told BBC Sport. – This year he is almost at the level of Max or any other rider. From my point of view, his season can be called perfect, except for two or three typical mistakes that anyone can make during the year, or lack of luck, which he may have missed – just like me.

While I have nothing to be proud of, because I am behind. I will be proud of the day I am ahead of my teammate in the stats and until then I will keep working to find an opportunity to show better results on the circle.

However, it is the statistics that allow me to be proud of the progress made: I do not give up, I do not allow myself to endure a delay of 0.2 seconds (as it was at the beginning of the season ) and I’m always trying to find new approaches for pilots, which is not so easy.

You only have to look at other Formula 1 drivers to understand how difficult it is to change your perception of a car. Few people succeed, and I’m glad I was able to achieve this…

However, I always let others judge my strengths, while I prefer to criticize myself for certain weaknesses. But people sometimes underestimate my speed. I know I’m a fast rider, but I just don’t like to talk about it. It is enough that I, my engineers and everyone I work with are aware of this.

But despite the progress in qualifying and the fact that Carlos was ahead of his teammate in the race in Mexico City, he agrees that he should show better results on Sunday.

“In 2022 I drove worse than in previous years, this was my weak point,” Sainz admitted. “This season we have a lot of problems with the new Pirelli tyres. For some reason this car is very difficult to start, the F1-75 has some kind of inherent flaw that prevents you from starting as well as in previous years.

It’s worse to control both tire wear and race pace, so it’s much harder to be flexible in choosing tactics. This made her options less than I’d like. I’m going to work on all these points in the remaining two phases of the season and next year to become more competitive.