Ferrari's hopes of contending for Formula 1's 2024 constructors' championship will hinge on its performance at the United States Grand Prix, reckons Carlos Sainz.
After a series of upgrades made Ferrari's instability in high-speed corners more obvious thanks to the appearance of bouncing, the team had to roll back its Barcelona floor upgrade and subsequently brought revised versions at Hungaroring and Monza to fix that issue.
Sainz says that Ferrari has found renewed confidence with its form in the past three races, but reckons that the unique natures of the Monza, Baku, and Singapore circuits mean the team does not yet know if it has truly cured its bouncing issues at high speed.
He says that if its form continues at more conventional circuits like Austin and Mexico, then the squad can realistically believe it can beat both Red Bull and McLaren to the coveted teams' title.
"The more tracks that we've done since Monza, the more confident we are that the upgrades that we brought to the car have started to work pretty much everywhere," explained the Spaniard, who will join Williams next season.
"But I've always said, until we go to Austin and we try them in a normal track, we will not be able to measure how much we've actually improved on tracks like Zandvoort and Spa, where we last struggled a bit more.
"So I think this will be the most important test so far for us, to see whether all these upgrades that we brought in the past are working in the right direction for more of a normal kind of track, like we see here in Austin.
"I think a lot of our belief in the constructors' title will come over the next couple of races. If from here to the end, all the races were like Singapore, Baku and Monza, we would believe that we can do it.
"If in Austin, Mexico, Brazil, that are more standard tracks, we see ourselves falling back a bit and being like we were in Zandvoort or Spa, obviously our belief goes down.
"We are coming back to normal tracks with long combined corners, high-speed corners. Let's see where we are now in these kind of tracks and see if we can still fight like we did in Singapore."
Sainz's team-mate Charles Leclerc reckoned that the team was now moving in the right direction, echoing Sainz's suggestion that the efficacy of Ferrari's upgrades was difficult to judge over the previous races.
He stated that, despite the compressed nature of the Austin sprint weekend, Ferrari had enough data to ensure it can determine whether it has made a genuine step forward following the race.
"For sure, it's a very important weekend. However, I wouldn't say that it's a lot more important than any other weekends where we've brought upgrades," Leclerc said.
"Those upgrades that we've brought in the past few races were difficult to judge. Now it's a good track to judge them, and hopefully we have positive feedback out of them, because this is what we believe is the right direction at the moment.
"I hope we don't learn something new that we didn't understand before. But I'm pretty confident that we are going in the right direction, and that this weekend we should see the results that we are expecting from that."
Watch: Why Red Bull's Bib "Trick" has Sparked Controversy - F1 US GP Media Day Reaction
