The driving force that will yield Ferrari’s next F1 title

The 2022 Formula 1 season is nearly here. Pushed back a year by the COVID-19 pandemic, the championship’s new era is about to begin. For the teams that have looked on enviously as Mercedes and now Red Bull have tasted title success, it’s long been earmarked as the moment when they might just have their chance to vault up the competitive order.  

For Ferrari, the wait since its last title now runs to 14 years – its 2008 constructors’ success, with a further year tacked on for its most recent drivers’ crown (Kimi Raikkonen’s shock triumph against McLaren racers Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton).  

As you’re probably sick of hearing, no one knows exactly how the various interpretations of the new regulations up and down the F1 field are going to perform – wait for testing, then wait for qualifying in Bahrain, as the soundbites will go. But Ferrari has got one element required for sustained success sorted already. And it knows it. 

“They are pushing each other,” Ferrari racing director Laurent Mekies says of the team’s driver pairing, Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz Jr. “We are comfortable with that. We think that for us, the big picture is the way our drivers are pushing each other, the way they interact with each other, the way they interact with the team, the way they are part of the development of the car with the simulator. These guys go back between the races in Maranello to put themselves in a black box. We think it’s a competitive advantage.” 

The Leclerc/Sainz partnership is just a year old but, by the end of 2021, they had cemented what many suspected at the beginning of that campaign: that Ferrari’s driver line-up was the most formidable on last season’s grid. At the very start of the post-Sebastian Vettel era, the results immediately improved, with the Italian squad picking up five podiums, two poles and several serious shots at race wins.  

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The Ferrari SF21, with its reworked engine, was of course a significant improvement on the SF1000 disaster that resulted in the squad’s worst constructors’ result for 40 years, and that was the main thrust behind the team’s quick climb back up the F1 order. But Ferrari still needed drivers capable of securing such good results – the kind that are rarely left on the table by the Mercedes and Red Bull leaders.  

Sainz Jr and Leclerc formed an evenly-matched pairing at Ferrari in 2021

Photo by: Ferrari

From a Leclerc/Vettel 2-1 imbalance in shock podiums in 2020 (it would have been 3-0 had Leclerc not botched his late pass on Sergio Perez in Turkey, letting Vettel ahead also to sneak his final Ferrari trophy), Sainz led Leclerc 4-1 in rostrum visits come the end of 2021. The Spaniard’s third place in the Abu Dhabi finale (which might have been even higher had the lapped runners between him and Hamilton and Max Verstappen been allowed through, instead of only those so controversially between the title contenders) meant Sainz also sealed fifth in the drivers’ standings – best of the rest behind the frontrunners. 

It was, as Sainz repeatedly said, just a “symbolic” triumph over his new team-mate and his former one: McLaren’s Lando Norris. But the fact that Leclerc’s points tally amounted to 96.7% of Sainz’s haul – up from Vettel’s 33.7% of Leclerc’s the previous year – is a more tangible representation of how Ferrari’s decision to move on from its former star rebalanced its line-up. Ultimately, all but Sainz’s Monaco podium of the team’s silverware haul required at least a slice of fortune from the dominant leaders hitting trouble or a chaotic race.  

To help get the fine overall results it did in 2021 and make good on its line-up’s potential, Ferrari needed to get Sainz up to speed fast. Fortunately, its new signing was no stranger to making himself comfortable in an unfamiliar F1 home – it was the Spaniard’s third new start in five seasons, and he has now raced for four of the championship’s 10 squads. 

"There is always more to come because of the way it is. But the way they complement each other, Carlos and Charles, is at the moment as good as it gets" Laurent Mekies

There was a January test with a 2018-spec car – a move the team repeated last week, albeit still with the SF71H and not the 2021 SF21 as originally planned thanks to ongoing confusion around F1’s sporting rules for 2022. Then, once Sainz was familiar with Ferrari’s operating procedures and Bahrain testing turned into the season proper, the team had to work out how to properly adapt his style – in terms of driving and technical feedback – to its own and Leclerc’s.

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Allied with the performance step from Ferrari’s upgraded hybrid system that provided a potent boost from September’s Russian Grand Prix, the results got better and better as 2021 went along. In fact, Leclerc’s 15th place in the rain in Sochi (he’d been eighth before the weather rolled in) was the only time either Ferrari driver finished outside the points in the second half of the year. 

“In the mix of that, we had Carlos’s integration,” Mekies explains. “You need to learn how to speak the same language – it takes time. We had also some progress with Carlos’s integration – he brought a lot of very solid feedback and approaches from his previous experiences. And it took us some time to integrate that with our own approaches, and then to blend it, and then eventually to use it best with Charles together.

“I think you saw some of that in the second half of the season with the double finishes [being more regular]. So, I would say at the beginning of last year, it was very easy to have a complete miss in the race. The second half of the season, this didn’t happen anymore.” 

Mekies has been impressed by Sainz's adaption to the team and believes he's firmly at home

Photo by: Ferrari

One way the pair combined well was in their technical feedback. While this has been previously identified as an area where Leclerc still needs to make some progress, Sainz’s experience from outside the squad, as well as his approach being different to his stablemate’s, proved to be valuable. 

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“We are enjoying very high-quality feedback from the drivers,” adds Mekies. “So, it’s never enough, but we think it’s one of the strong points now. Not only because they describe what they feel, but also because they have the will and motivation to go back and work with us on solutions.  

“They do it with different words, so we can click things together. They don’t always agree, which again gives us a chance to look at things in a wider way. We think that part is working well. There is always more to come because of the way it is. But the way they complement each other, Carlos and Charles, is at the moment as good as it gets.” 

Altogether, Ferrari worked hard to recover from its French GP tyre disaster. Its drivers returned from that race straight to Maranello to conduct a thorough investigation of its shocking struggles, which led to a series of tweaks to its systems to manage this discipline better. Although it still encountered challenging moments on tyre degradation, Ferrari bounced back strongly, with Leclerc managing his rubber well in his ultimately unsuccessful bid to hold off the recovering Hamilton in the British GP three races later.

But Mekies says Ferrari didn’t get unduly concerned by one slightly alarming theme that ran alongside the team’s new line-up getting on well throughout last year: the number of crashes the pair racked up.  There was Leclerc’s high-profile shunt in qualifying in Monaco, which secured his home pole but ultimately prevented him starting, while he also wiped the walls at Spa and in Jeddah. Sainz had a string of practice crashes in the summer and early autumn – in Hungary, the Netherlands and Italy – which he put down to pushing too hard, too early.  

“We want our drivers to push to the limit,” says Mekies. “We need that now. It’s the right time to do it! [Last season was] a budget cap year already, so you might say it’s a little bit too late. But it’s still the right time to do it compared to [2022]. It will be more expensive this year and more taxing from a development budget point of view.” 

The crashes didn’t mask the speed Leclerc and Sainz displayed in 2021. Take Monaco as an example. The drivers were able to get the best out of the SF21’s slow-speed strengths thanks to its solid front end and ease over bumps and kerbs, by working the softest Pirelli rubber on the smooth surface in a way that got the tyres into the optimum working window. This was an important quality that even Hamilton struggled with on that occasion. It “allowed them to build the right confidence”, according to Mekies, which resulted in Leclerc’s headline qualifying result – one he followed up in similar circumstances at the following round in Baku. 

Leclerc took pole in both Monaco and Baku, underlining Ferrari's single lap progress in 2021

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

The standout results may have contained no further wins since Vettel’s triumph in the 2019 Singapore GP, but Ferrari’s progress was clear to see in 2021. And the team is proud of how it has worked as a collective unit – of which the drivers are of course the highest-profile parts – to stay united and concentrate on its latest rebuild. There was little public criticism from either Leclerc or Sainz on the continued lack of victories, which speaks to the high levels of morale at Ferrari of late. Although that is easier to sustain without the pressures of a title fight… 

“We feel like, as a group, when you go through a very hard time and the group stays united, which is never a given, then you somehow put the lowest point behind you, and you start to put your way back,” explains Mekies. “That is how we feel. The positive energy comes from the fact that the group stayed united in the worst possible conditions. And that group, despite the limitations of the regulations [with the carryover car requirements for 2021], is managing to make some ground back. We are not excited of that. We just think that if we continue to work as hard as we did in that direction, it seems to take us to the right place.” 

At McLaren, Sainz had forged a firm bond with Norris, the pair becoming social media stars as a result of their friendship. A Ferrari move comes with different expectations and pressures, yet throughout 2021 the burgeoning relationship between Sainz and Leclerc seemed to be as jovial as the one McLaren had previously enjoyed for two years.  

"The level of respect, the level of desire to work together, the level of trust in both as characters and in technical abilities is huge. And they both share the same drive to push the team to recover" Laurent Mekies

There were tense moments – Sainz was understandably exasperated that his team-mate’s error and Monaco shunt had cost him his own shot of securing pole and a possible win, plus there was their scrap in Jeddah, which may well have come to the stewards’ attention had it not been an internecine affair. 

But there is a clear respect between them, as evidenced by their team-orders cooperation in Mexico, even if the first pass was handled slightly scruffily by Leclerc. Sainz even ended 2021 by saying: “We will exchange some information and we will try and both become better drivers, learning from each other. I think that this tight battle and this tight competition is what is going to bring Charles and me again to a better level next season and it’s also going to benefit Ferrari and ourselves. So, it’s a great competition to have and a great team-mate to have.” 

Leclerc is Ferrari’s undisputed star given his long contract, and he showed little sign of being publicly ruffled by his new team-mate’s fine first year in red. In fact, Sainz says seeing Leclerc’s “crazy quick” driving style in the data Ferrari produced meant he “had to copy a lot of the stuff” to “adapt myself”.

That’s fine teamwork, with Ferrari insiders saying that Sainz also maintained his level-headed, diplomatic reputation since joining at the start of last year. Boats were not rocked and the elevation in status brought by a move to F1’s most storied (and still most successful) squad did not go to his head. It’s little wonder Mekies says Ferrari’s line-up is “as good as it gets” – both in terms of the drivers’ friendship and how it helps the team as a result. 

Leclerc and Sainz have a good relationship, underpinned by mutual respect

Photo by: Ferrari

“I don’t know if they’re friends or not,” Mekies adds. “But what I can tell you is that the level of respect, the level of desire to work together, the level of trust in both as characters and in technical abilities is huge. And they both share the same drive to push the team to recover.  

“If you look in Saudi, on Friday night, we were not great [Sainz was seventh and behind Pierre Gasly’s AlphaTauri and the Alpine pair in FP2, while Leclerc crashed heavily]. We didn’t want to settle for it. We never want to settle for it, but there was just that spirit.

“And it’s the second to last race or whatever, just that spirit – there is something more, we knew there was something more that was there in the car that we couldn’t quite grasp. Then, the race circumstances were the race circumstances, but if you look at the first stint of the race before the first red flag, Charles was a comfortable fourth, Perez was behind. So ultimately, a strong race pace came out from that.

“So I think, long story short, these two guys, the way they work with us, the way we have integrated them, the way they are contributing, is a very significant competitive advantage. We don’t want to stop there. We want to develop that because we think there is more to come as well. But certainly, it’s one of the strong points we have.” 

And that will continue to be the case in the upcoming campaign. But, with the possibility for increased success and other changes around the F1 paddock, things will be different. 

In 2021, Ferrari’s line-up looked like the best and most balanced on paper ahead of the season starting, and so it proved to be. But this time around, Mercedes’ move to replace Valtteri Bottas with George Russell as Hamilton’s team-mate arguably gives F1’s current leading team the mantle of ‘best driver line-up’. But that is still yet to be proven and, indeed, Russell may take some time to reach Hamilton’s level – if he ever does. At the same time, he could be a winner from the off…  

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Leclerc and Sainz delivered what Ferrari needed in 2021, but if the team makes good on its intentions (shared by so many other midfield squads) and does vault back to the front of the grid, their relationship will inevitably take on a different form. When wins and titles are on the line, the niceties go out of the window – just look at how ugly things got between Red Bull and Mercedes last year, or with Hamilton and Nico Rosberg when an intra-team affair dominates a championship. For now, Ferrari is keen to uphold the current status quo. 

Ferrari is eager to keep the existing status quo and avoid nominating a lead driver

Photo by: Ferrari

“In terms of drivers, as we have often said, it is the track that will dictate it,” team principal Mattia Binotto said at Ferrari’s 2021 end-of-year Christmas media event. “The priority is always the team. But, no doubt, if they can compete for an important position in the championship, it will be the track that will tell who’s ahead. And sometimes, I think it’s not only about driver talent or driver capacity. A driver can be a lot unfortunate, and have damage, reliability issues, or crashes [as Leclerc did in 2021]. 

“So, I don’t think that we need at this stage, and certainly we will not have a policy, of number one or number two. We will simply discuss it based on positions on track whenever it will be time.” 

This current policy is an intriguing stance for Ferrari to take, and perhaps hints at the lessons it learned from Leclerc’s battle with Vettel igniting in 2019, the last time the team was able to take the fight to the front of the F1 grid, in large part thanks to its controversial engine power.

At the start of that season, Leclerc’s first at Ferrari and second overall in F1, Binotto insisted that Vettel would be “the guide with which we aim for the championship” once the campaign got under way. This approach was tested almost from the off, with Leclerc going wheel-to-wheel with Vettel and then leaving him behind in his near-victory in Bahrain.

"We are competitors, we all want to win, nobody is happy with third" Laurent Mekies

Come the end of 2019, the pair’s fight for superiority resulted in the embarrassing crash in Brazil. So, Binotto is wise to take a diplomatic stance before a 2022 car has even turned a wheel – and of course there is no guarantee that Ferrari will even find itself in better circumstances this time around. But the team opting to “make zero compromises for 2022”, according to Mekies, has raised expectations of a possible Honda/Brawn-like turnaround a la 2009.

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“The last aero bit we got on the car was probably Silverstone,” Mekies says of Ferrari’s approach to balancing the limited 2021 car development and concentrating on the upcoming design rules overhaul. “The only development we had in the second half of the year was the hybrid, which again is something we’ll use for 2022.

“As individuals, you have a degree of excitement because you want to see where you are going to be, because you have been working on that project for such a number of months. Now you want to see the results. We are competitors, we all want to win, nobody is happy with third.”

If Ferrari’s dream is realised this year, keeping its driver line-up balanced and harmonious is a key test of its progress since 2019. But with their speed and proven ability in helping the team make progress in a year with such limited scope for development as was the case in 2021, Leclerc and Sainz unite to create what Ferrari needs to finally make it back to the success that has now long been missing in Maranello. And that, ultimately, is F1 titles.

Keeping the harmony in Ferrari's driver lineup will be important for future success

Photo by: Ferrari