Ferrari Formula 1 driver Carlos Sainz expects his team to be more competitive in Austria after finding the car’s main weakness punished in Spain. Sainz and teammate Charles Leclerc qualified in the third row in Barcelona, behind both Mercedes and front-row duo Lando Norris (Mclaren) and Max Verstappen (Red Bull). Its race pace wasn’t too different, as both drivers were unable to get ahead of the Mercedes duo despite trying to split their tire strategy, finishing in the same positions they started from.
Sainz admitted Ferrari were fourth fastest in his home race, but said Barcelona’s layout punished Ferrari’s long corner weakness more than other circuits, which are expected to be competitive more this weekend at the Red Bull Ring. “It wasn’t our best weekend, but it was also the track where we struggled the most last year,” Sainz said.
“So that’s our hope, that it’s just a [bad] track for us and there will be other tracks where we’ll be a little more competitive. “It’s the high-speed nature of the track and the long [corners], combined, we always seem to struggle when we have long corners like China, here or Suzuka. “I remember Austria is not a problem in terms of track characteristics, so I think we will be more competitive thanks to the types of corners.”
Team boss Fred Vasseur feels Barcelona’s pecking order does not necessarily set the trend for the remaining races before the summer break, with the narrow margins between the top four causing greater fluctuations than in years before.
“The order is changing because in the last four weekends you’ve had four different teams taking pole positions. We’re not changing cars massively, which means it’s more to do with the layout.” racetrack location, complexes, to the temperature range. “Before drawing conclusions we have to stay calm, we have to go event by event and [in Austria] it will have a completely different format, different runway, different type of corners and maybe the picture will Completely different next week. “Nothing is forever in F1 today and that means it’s not clear which team is better than the other.”
Vasseur said Ferrari especially failed in Barcelona qualifying, so the team needed to dig deeper into how to keep the SF-24 in the right tire window throughout a lap. “The most important thing in Barcelona is to maintain the potential of the tires throughout the entire race in different corners,” he explained. “Maybe we missed something because we were two-tenths off. “But with 14 corners in Barcelona, we don’t lose a hundredth per corner. We lose twice a tenth per lap and the rest of the lap is Lando’s copy-paste. “
