Ferrari confirmed in the first race of the course the good feeling it had left during the pre-season tests, and its two drivers qualified first and third on Saturday before achieving a double on Sunday.
Carlos Sainz was somewhat upset despite his great result, as he admitted that he had not been able to get the most out of his car as his teammate did. This Thursday, in the run-up to the Saudi Arabian GP, which will be the second round of the year, the man from Madrid did not want to delve too deeply into what he lacks to adapt 100%, but he was hopeful for the future.
“It is something too specific and too technical to explain it to the press. They are things, it is feeling with the car, knowing exactly what to do in each type of corner to extract the maximum and then put the car a little more to my liking so that I go more comfortable with it just like I did in the second half of 2021,” he told the media present, including Motorsport.com.
“I insist, it’s very technical. There are things that I still don’t understand myself. But if with the car from Bahrain I managed to be second, when I have the car to my liking, I’m convinced that good times will come”.
Only a few days have passed since the Bahrain GP, but they have been days in which Sainz has been working with his engineers to find a solution to this lack of feeling with the car.
And there’s good news: they’ve uncovered “interesting theories” as to why he didn’t feel as comfortable as Charles Leclerc and will test it out in free practice on Friday.
“I was there in the fight for pole position in qualifying and that was good news for me, because with the lack of feeling that I have with this car and the lack of understanding that I feel I have, it was good news to be able to give a couple of very good laps in qualifying that almost gave me pole position”, he explained.
“But the point is that I still have to work on the set-up and understanding of the car. I’ve done my analysis in these three days with my guys and we have a couple of very interesting theories. So there are a couple of very interesting things that try here.”
“I don’t think it’s a question of a race, but it’s a bit like last year, little by little it improves this and that. We also need more examples. I don’t know if Bahrain was a bit exceptional and suddenly here I will be back to where I should be, or where I hope to be. It’s still early days,” he warned.
With additional reporting by Jonathan Noble and Erwin Jaeggi
