Carlos Sainz has told Ferrari team-mate Charles Leclerc he has no intention of being second best this year.
This is the Spaniard's third season with the team since joining from McLaren. In his debut season, he raised plenty of eyebrows in the Formula 1 world by beating Leclerc – the man who the team has built its future around since he joined in 2019.
But with the 2022 season came a new set of car regulations which all the teams had to adapt to. And it was an adjustment period for the drivers too – one which proved to be especially difficult for Sainz.
While Leclerc did his best to provide some competition for Max Verstappen in the title race last year, Sainz finished 62 points adrift of his team-mate. But he is back ahead in the standings after five races of this 2023 season and feels he has finally now found his groove with this generation of cars.
"It's not an easy car," Sainz told The Race. "At the moment, we are struggling a bit with unpredictability, with a very tricky car, which makes putting laps together in quali, race pace, changing conditions, tyre wear, wind, very, very tricky to predict and very tricky to adapt to.
"As a driver, leaving that aside, I feel like I understand how I need to drive this generation of cars, I understand how I want to set up the car to my liking, or at least this generation of cars to my liking. And that leaves me with less variables to think about going into a race weekend.
"It hasn't been an easy start, as I said, but I feel like even if the car is possibly even trickier than last year, I understand that trickiness better. And I can set up and drive the car in my way."
Meanwhile, both Ferrari drivers have come in for criticism with Ralf Schumacher suggesting neither of them are good enough to match the team's ambitions. He said: "I see the biggest problem with the drivers. For me, they're just not consistent enough.
"With his mistakes, Leclerc shows that he either doesn't have the maturity or maybe, at the end of the day, he's not consistently good enough to win a world championship for Ferrari. And Sainz was eight-tenths away from Leclerc in one weekend. To be honest, the Ferrari team is currently doing a better job than both drivers."
