Verstappen-Norris incident, Sainz: “Clear rules, I don’t want any more”

First F1 victory two years ago

Excluding the 2021 season, which is his first of his career at the wheel of Ferrari, Carlos Sainz won a race in every season he spent with the Prancing Horse. That of 2022which was also synonymous with his first success in Formula 1, he achieved it at Silverstoneon the circuit where Formula 1 will hold its third consecutive GP after Barcelona and Spielberg. Two years after that success, the Spaniard highlighted the difficulties of the SF-24, a car that however has almost nothing in common with the F1-75: “This year’s car is better everywhere – has explained – as always in this sport, it’s relative to the competition. The ’22 car was much slower than the ’24 one, but for what we had at the time it was very fast compared to the Red Bulls, the Mercedes and especially the McLarens. Now, even though the ’24 is much faster than the ’22, you have the feeling of having lost the ’22, because with that we were more competitive compared to others, but this car is much more complete compared to that of ’22”.

Updates and the new Ferrari package

Focusing exclusively on the present, Sainz highlighted some difficulties that do not exclusively concern Ferrari, such as bringing the new updates: “It’s a lot more difficult for teams, 100% – he has declared – It’s already very difficult for the driver to understand how to extract performance from these cars. In some corners you feel like you can push flat out, while in others you have to control your driving style and be very disciplined in how you drive the car to find the lap time. For the engineers it’s a very similar thing. I think everyone on this grid, at one point or another, has struggled with these updates.”. To this comment, #55 you then added that of new package brought by Ferrari: “Certainly this new package still has potential to be optimized, but in the short term we want to understand if we have taken a step in the right direction or notbecause this will also help the future development. This is the real priority for the team. We accept and we realize that after Barcelona we have been less competitive than before Barcelona and this obviously raises our concerns a little bit about the package and we definitely need to try to understand as much as possible everything that is involved and we want to do this exercise in the future. But at the same time the others are not standing still and they are progressing exponentially. So we are trying to keep up with them”.

Too many rules even for Sainz

Also inevitable, or almost, is Sainz’s point of view on the key episode last week in Austria between Norris and Verstappen, with the contact between the two a few laps from the checkered flag that cost both the victory. A rather brief opinion, unlike that on the current rules in F1, already contested by other ‘colleagues’: “In my opinion, it is clear that you can move to defend and then go back, but always leaving the width of one car to the white line so that the other car can enter. This is the rule, but I can’t stand the fact that we have to keep adding rules. I think there are already a lot of them. If you read the rules, you can understand what you have to do if you overtake on the inside, what you have to do if you defend yourself on the inside, what you have to do if you attack on the outside, what you have to do if you attack and defend yourself from the outside. It’s a series of different rules, already very detailed and specific, that I struggle to follow exactly when I’m in the car and I’m going 300 km/h, because you can’t think at that speed with all these rules. So yes, I don’t want any more rules. The rules are quite clear and there has already been a decision by the stewards. So there’s not much to talk about.”

Thanks to Briatore

In conclusion, Sainz expressed all his gratitude to Flavio Briatore for the latter’s words about him, demonstrating Alpine’s interest in having him in the team next season: “Thank you so much to Flavio for the kind words and especially from someone like him who understands this sport and who has been here for a while and has seen, I think, a few riders in his career. So yeah, I feel good about those words. Thank you.”