Why Toro Rosso's other young gun can't be ignored

You could forgive Carlos Sainz Jr a few covetous glances to the other side of the Toro Rosso garage.

Here is a guy who has earned his way into Formula 1 through the Red Bull Junior programme, been a champion at the level just below in Formula Renault 3.5, and scored points on his F1 debut. Yet it's the teenage sensation in the other car hogging the limelight.

The rise of Max Verstappen is the perfect story for Red Bull. It picked up a raw talent with less than a year of single-seater racing experience under his belt and thrust him into F1 before he was old enough to pass his driving test. Sink or swim.

And so far he's been swimming strongly, which is a great way to try promoting energy drinks to a new generation. A boy among men who can show the old guys how it's done.

There have been sensational turns of speed, strong results and some spectacular overtaking moves. No wonder Verstappen has stolen so much of F1's media spotlight over the past 12 months or so.

For 20-year-old Sainz, it has been harder to stand out. Like Max - son of '90s F1 journeyman Jos Verstappen - Sainz is of motorsport family stock. In fact they don't come much bigger than 'King' Carlos Sainz, twice World Rally champion and hero of Spain.

But reaching F1 has at least allowed Carlos Jr to shrug off the 'son of Sainz' tag that followed him through his junior career. Now he faces the challenge of standing out against Verstappen, without the publicity benefit of an unconventional rise through the ranks.

Make no mistake, Verstappen earned his chance by being sensational in karting and European Formula 3. Red Bull would not have signed him from under the nose of Mercedes on a fixed three-year contract otherwise.

But Sainz's story is more conventional - Formula BMW, F3, GP3, FR3.5, and now F1. Sainz has produced excellent performances of his own, but hasn't enjoyed such strong results, hasn't been able to use that extra experience to dominate Verstappen, and hasn't made quite the same immediate impact.

Autosport puts this to Sainz as we sit down for a catch-up in the paddock, and he reveals it is something that has played on his mind at times.

"It's a good topic and a difficult topic to answer too," he says, pondering the dynamic as he adjusts the Red Bull cap on his head, no longer the lucky grey one he kept from his 2014 FR3.5 title winning season that Fernando Alonso threw into the Spanish GP crowd last year. "It's not easy, but first of all Max deserves the recognition and attention. He's doing a good job.

"From my personal side the first thing I care about is what Red Bull thinks about me, what Franz Tost thinks about me, what Helmut Marko thinks about me, and I know at the moment what they think after my first year is very positive.

"At the beginning of 2015 no one spoke about me. I didn't exist! If I don't get the same recognition and media attention because of not being the same age as Max, or whatever, in the end I have to live with it. I cannot eat into my mind about this fact. I'm not going to lie, sometimes it can get frustrating, but you get used to it!"

He points out that people began to notice him more as last season went on. He is right to do so. That debut campaign was very successful in its own way, it just wasn't as obviously outstanding as his team-mate's.

Sainz put in some great drives, but suffered the brunt of Toro Rosso's unreliability in 2015, including four consecutive engine-related retirements in the Austrian, British, Hungarian and Belgian Grands Prix - all races in which he could realistically have scored points.

Nevertheless he was neck-and-neck with Verstappen in the intra-team qualifying battle and made a quiet, understated impression on Toro Rosso.

"He's a brilliant guy to work with and he's performed above expectation," reckons Toro Rosso technical director James Key. "Carlos has come with this very mature plan of what he wants to achieve.

"It gives Max a good reference point on what sort of feedback is perhaps expected at this sort of level. Carlos just stepped into that and gave us the feedback we needed.

"We've been super-impressed by him actually. I wasn't here when [Jean-Eric] Vergne and [Daniel] Ricciardo started it, so it's difficult to compare from the beginning, but I was here when [Daniil] Kvyat started and he was rated incredibly highly, and it's a similar deal with our drivers now."

People rightly talk about Verstappen's maturity - and he is extraordinarily mature for an 18-year-old - but Sainz is arguably a cut above in this regard. The way his 2015 races repeatedly unravelled through no fault of his own, but also the way he refused to let this sink him, made people take notice.

The way he maintains a level head, shrugs off disappointment and moves on to the next challenge displays the sort of fortitude that Red Bull and Marko relish seeing in their drivers. And it's this sort of reaction to adversity that earns public respect. He is also a gregarious guy, willing to see the funny side of bad situations.

"He's a very mature, collected character," adds Key. "Not easily fazed, there's no baggage there, he doesn't hold a grudge, he's super-easy to work with, lovely guy, and he has been slightly below the radar, and deserves slightly more recognition than perhaps he's got."

Sainz had so many setbacks last season - his Renault engine going bang regularly, a huge crash in practice in Russia, a stupid shunt in the wet in qualifying in the United States - but he always rebounded instantly. Back in the car, straight back on it, immediately back to quietly impressing Red Bull with the quality of his driving.

To Red Bull it's performance that counts above results. And much of that is tied up in attitude. If you act like a spoiled brat Red Bull is going to lose patience with you pretty quickly. That's why Verstappen was so sensibly quick to apologise for his radio rants in Australia.

In that race he became too focused on his team-mate and things rapidly went south. This is a real potential danger for both drivers, which comes with the inevitable fact they are ultimately fighting each other for a future in F1 with Red Bull.

"Sometimes you see that, because a) they're still young and it's only their second year, and secondly there's been a lot of very positive things said about them from last year," explains Key. "So of course there's that pressure, and the Red Bull pressure.

"It's natural to be in competition with your team-mate, but the best way to progress is to worry about yourself. Look at Daniel Ricciardo when he went to Red Bull. He concentrated on his thing and he matured massively. That's what our guys have been urged to do as well."

Sainz already seems to be showing the requisite focus. The first races of this season have not exactly gone to plan, so once again he must remain resolute and avoid getting frustrated.

It must help enormously that he has one of the most focused individuals in the paddock to look up to. Double world champion Alonso - a fellow Spaniard - is something of a mentor figure to Sainz, who is determined to follow his great childhood hero's example of how to succeed in F1.

"My learning process from Fernando has been very strange, because he would never tell me directly how to do a corner, or how to arrive to a track and [figure out] the technical side of the track," explains Sainz. "It's more going to dinners with him, watching his killer attitude.

"You can see he's looking into every detail. You talk to him about something during a lunch and you see he talks about a detail you maybe wouldn't have even thought about, to do with the starts or the first lap positioning.

"Suddenly you realise, wow! This guy is broad and is thinking about every single thing. He's so hungry for winning, and just by having these conversations with him - not necessarily about racing or cars - you learn that to beat him, or be a world champion, you must be a bit like him in your own way.

"You need to be as hungry, as methodical, as detailed. He's a benchmark in behaviour, both on the personal side and the technical side."

Alonso, while not perfect, is a pretty good template for a young driver looking to carve out a long and successful career at the pinnacle of single-seater racing.

Sainz may not have made as many waves as his younger team-mate Verstappen thus far, but in his own quiet way he is still giving Red Bull and the rest of the F1 paddock some serious food for thought, and certainly making sure that he cannot be ignored.