Carlos Sainz described his car's lack of race pace as a "slap in the face" after Ferrari struggled again at the Miami Grand Prix.
Despite plenty of optimism before the start of the season, Ferrari are nowhere near where they want to be. Talk of a title bid looks to be nothing more than fantasy right now and a fair amount of bad luck has gone the Italians' way already.
Engine reliability gremlins have already reared their ugly heads, while Charles Leclerc, perhaps in his desperation to reverse his team's fortunes, has crashed several times by pushing too hard. But while luck can change in an instant, Ferrari have a deeper concern.
While one-lap pace does not seem to be an issue – Leclerc has largely been able to compete with the Red Bulls on a Saturday – a different story is told during a race with tyre degradation in particular a real concern. Having a car which is not at its best when the points are dished out is, clearly, a fundamental problem.
The performance drop from qualifying to race is a difficult pill for Sainz to swallow, especially after dropping from third on the grid to fifth at the end of the Miami GP. "Good stint with the mediums, that made me think that the podium and passing Fernando [Alonso] was possible," began the Spaniard.
But he added: "We stopped on lap 18 or so and, when we stopped and did two or three fast laps with the hard to do the undercut, that ruined the rest of the race because we started to degrade and overheat the tyre.
"We have a car with very little flexibility in terms of strategy, so if you try anything you get out of the ideal number of laps for the hard tyres and it can be very long. We suffer a lot from inconsistency, overheating and so on.
"We have to keep trying things, but every Saturday we fight for pole and then Sunday comes and we get a bit of a slap in the face in the race, with the Red Bulls on another planet, the Aston Martin also with better degradation, the Mercedes who are a second behind in qualifying suddenly two or three tenths down on us."
Ferrari sit fourth in the constructors' standings behind those three teams mentioned by Sainz. Mercedes are 18 points ahead in third with Aston Martin six points further away, but all of them already look unlikely to challenge Red Bull who have a 122-point buffer to their nearest rivals already.
