The multiple facets behind Sainz's growing stature at Ferrari

In the midst of another tough year for Ferrari, Carlos Sainz has had his best season yet for the team, and it looks as if it will secure him a long-term future at Maranello.

Just after the summer break, Sainz’s position at Ferrari looked less guaranteed. He wanted to stay beyond the end of his current contract, which finishes next season, but the team wasn’t as sure.

There were questions about the dynamic between Sainz and team-mate Charles Leclerc; about some of the ways the intense competition between them had occasionally frayed more than the matey official Ferrari social media posts would suggest; about whether Sainz really was the best
long-term partner for Leclerc, who remains the team’s primary driver
in heart and mind, even if Ferrari doesn’t designate them as one and
two, and both are treated equally.

But Sainz – who still has other options outside Ferrari for 2025, particularly at what will become Audi – has changed minds in his favour. As the season comes to its close, his desire to stay is matched by Ferrari’s wish to keep him. Things can change, of course, but for now it looks as
if Sainz and Leclerc – for whom a new contract is a given – will be continuing together at Maranello for some time to come.

It’s easy to see why. On the face of it, on the basis of pure results alone, Sainz has been Ferrari’s stronger driver this year at the time of writing.

In the aftermath of the US Grand Prix, Sainz was ahead in the championship by 20 points, and he had won a race, which Leclerc had
not, with a superb defensive drive from pole position at Singapore.
There, the team’s quiet progress on race tactics this year under new
boss Frederic Vasseur became very clear as the pitwall managed both drivers, used Leclerc as a blocker and sacrificed him to manipulate the
race to ease Sainz to victory.

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

A key aspect of Sainz's Singapore success was beating Leclerc in qualifying, which meant his race strategy was sacrificed to protect Sainz early on

It was the sort of grand prix that previous iterations of Ferrari might have fumbled in the past – indeed had fumbled. Think back to Monaco 2022, where it managed to turn a front row lock-out for Leclerc and
Sainz into fourth and second through terrible strategic choices that
placed the race in Red Bull’s lap.

That Sainz was the man who benefited from the intra-team tactical approach in Singapore was simply down to the fact that he had been the one who had narrowly come out on top in qualifying. Just as he had the race before in Italy, to earn himself the chance to go head-to-head with Max Verstappen for victory, even if his valiant struggle was ultimately in vain.

Room at the top

“It’s been a decent season overall,” Sainz says. “I was feeling good with the car straight away from the beginning of the season. Then, going through this first phase of the year, where we were trying to understand where we were, why we were suddenly half a second off Red Bull, why at other circuits we were nearly on pole, understanding what was going on and
what had Red Bull done to all of us, which was to, all of a sudden,
dominate the way they were doing.

"I sat down with my engineers and said: ‘OK, what do
we do to start putting the whole weekend together better? Because
clearly we have a lot of pace'" Carlos Sainz

“First part was obviously a bit under expectations, but then we put our heads down and we started working well, and we nailed the opportunity when it came in Singapore. And that means a lot for us this year.”

The successes of Monza and Singapore, Sainz’s strongest races of the season, came after an analytical breakthrough typical of the man.

Sainz has long been known for the thoughtful way he goes about his racing. His technical inputs are highly valued by the Ferrari engineers and, in his nearly three years at Maranello, his grasp of live race strategy from inside the car has been crucial to the team on a number of occasions.

Take that race in Monaco in 2022, for example, where his insistence on staying out on wets rather than switching to intermediates before an eventual move to slicks – as the team had disastrously done to Leclerc – prevented Sainz from suffering the same fate as his team-mate and kept him ahead of at least one of the Red Bulls.

And at Silverstone last year, where his decision to reject the team’s
order to protect Leclerc, who had been left out in the lead on fading worn tyres during a late-race safety car, was key in securing a win for Ferrari – and Sainz’s own first – rather than potentially letting another one slip through the team’s fingers by trying to compensate for the mistake it
had already made with Leclerc’s race.

Photo by: Glenn Dunbar / Motorsport Images

Deciding not to sit behind Leclerc at the British GP's safety car restart in 2022 showed Sainz's strong reading of races

Sainz headed into the summer this year determined to take stock of
a season that he felt was going well but was not quite delivering in
terms of actual results.

He recalls: “I sat down with my engineers and said: ‘OK, what do
we do to start putting the whole weekend together better? Because
clearly we have a lot of pace. We’re doing some good things but not
putting the whole thing together. What can we do to improve that
and have consistent performances?’

“Zandvoort was a very good weekend, Monza was almost perfect
and Singapore was perfect. When you work and analyse and you have
the speed, it pays off.”

Sainz’s performances, though, do not come in isolation. The comparison between him and Leclerc this year has revealed some of the trends the team has gone through on the performance front.

The naked results hide some bad luck and mishaps for Leclerc that have skewed the picture of a year in which the Monegasque has, on balance, for the third year running, been Ferrari’s stronger driver. Sainz might have won a race but, after Austin, Leclerc had four on-track podiums to Sainz’s two (although Leclerc’s disqualification in Austin made it three-all).
And three grand prix poles – and one in a sprint – to Sainz’s one.

On balance, across the season so far Leclerc has been faster but more ragged; Sainz a smidge slower but more consistent. Sainz was outstanding in Monza and Singapore; Leclerc in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan, Belgium and Japan.

In terms of their one-lap head-to-head, Sainz has had his best season yet up against the man some consider to be potentially the out-and-out fastest driver on the grid. The score was 15-10 to Leclerc across all sessions where a fair comparison could be made at the time of writing.

But there is a statistical quirk, in that the average gap between them has actually been the biggest of their three years as team-mates. In both 2021 and 2022, it was around 0.12s in Leclerc’s favour; this year it is 0.186s. Although all of that offset is accounted for by Baku, where Leclerc was especially strong – as always – and beat Sainz, who struggled, by 0.8s and 0.4s in the two qualifying sessions. Take out Azerbaijan and the average gap goes down to a more ‘normal’ 0.106s.

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

Sainz has put a lot of work into coming out of the traps quickly at the start of GP weekends since the summer, and cites Zandvoort as a particularly strong weekend

Car trouble

Ferrari’s car has also impacted on the intra-team battle. The team headed into 2023 confident it had made significant progress and was in a shape to battle Red Bull for honours, but it took not much more than a day or so of the Bahrain pre-season test for Ferrari to realise that would not be the case.

The car was unstable to the extent of being nasty, and both drivers struggled with it in the first part of the season. In those early races, Leclerc refused to dial back his own aggressive style or compromise on his preferred oversteery set-up, and sometimes paid the price because that made it easier for the car to bite the driver – such as in his ragged weekend in Miami, where the car’s weakness in long-duration corners was brutally exposed.

Since then, the SF-23 has gone through two phases of development that have caused the dynamic between the two drivers to shift. It’s not a coincidence that, since the Suzuka update, Leclerc has been in the ascendancy – faster in every qualifying session from Japan to Austin other than the sprint shoot-out in Qatar, and at an average of just over 0.2s a lap.

As the season has gone on, there looks to have been a shift. The drivers still want to beat each other, but they are more accepting of team orders, trusting that Vasseur is open and honest and transparent with them

This ebb and flow between Sainz and Leclerc has led some observers to question whether there is a fundamental flaw in Ferrari’s line-up. Some argue that because the two drivers so clearly want different things from the car, only one of them can be happy on any given weekend. There is even the question of whether this could have a detrimental effect on car development.

But Vasseur dismisses this notion. He argues that the differences are not significant, and certainly not so large that they cannot be dealt with by individual set-up preferences, once Ferrari has a car that is more benign. And he points out that, even when the car was being set up with deliberate understeer, Leclerc was still competitive.

“We can fine-tune and find a compromise and a good solution and a good balance for both sides of the garage,” he says. “We don’t have to do a conclusion on P4 or P5 when we are speaking about hundredths of seconds. Charles was on pole in Spa in front of Carlos with the old package, but we have to take it easy and each weekend from Spa we are speaking about hundredths of seconds.

“When we’re doing the pole, it’s by thousandths or hundredths and when you’re P4 and you’re a bit disappointed, sometimes it’s for 0.1 or 0.2s. It’s not a drama. It’s not that we are changing completely the approach. Sometimes it’s a driver mistake, sometimes it’s a set-up mistake.”

Photo by: Ferrari

The characteristics of Ferrari's SF-23 have changed significantly during the year, favouring Sainz and Leclerc at different points

Vasseur’s impact on both Sainz and the team as a whole this year should not be underestimated. The Frenchman is a racer at heart, with a long experience of running teams in the junior formulae and in F1, and his straightforward approach has not only begun to get the team on the right track strategically. It has also helped calm down the tensions that over the previous two years popped up occasionally between the drivers.

Friend or foe

Sainz knew the deal when he signed – Leclerc was the ‘main man’, the brilliant talent who after just one season with the team in 2019 was signed to one of Ferrari’s longest-ever contracts to lead its charge into the future.  While Leclerc was A-list, along with Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton, Sainz was there as a strong back-up – a kind of A- driver, if you like. Inevitably, perhaps, it led to an element of insecurity in Sainz, a desire
to prove his worth to the team – to establish that he, too, should be considered a potential champion.

Perhaps it has manifested itself in moments such as in qualifying
at Silverstone this year, where the team had discussed and agreed beforehand who would go out first in the queue after a red flag, but still Sainz came on the radio as they left the pits to question why it had been Leclerc and not him, emphasising that he was slower at the time and therefore more vulnerable to being knocked out.

That little episode ended with Sainz overtaking Leclerc around the last corner as they both opened their final laps in that session. Leclerc was unimpressed. There was notable tension between the two in the media pen afterwards – they did not even look at each other, let alone fist bump, as they passed with one leaving one section of the pen and the other entering it.

But, as the season has gone on, there looks to have been a shift. The drivers still want to beat each other, but they are more accepting of team orders, trusting that Vasseur is open and honest and transparent with them, but also firm when necessary.

The way he handled Monza was a key example. Vasseur took a very atypical Ferrari decision in letting them race each other for third in the closing laps even though the team had nothing to gain. They repaid him with a gripping but fair fight, on the edge, but never actually risking their cars, just as he had hoped.

Likewise the pragmatic tactics of Singapore. Sainz was on pole; Leclerc third on the grid. If Ferrari was going to win the race, the only way to do it was by protecting Sainz. The plan was methodically laid out, and executed to perfection.

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

Vasseur has allowed Sainz and Leclerc to fight each other on track, most notably at Monza

Within Ferrari there is a feeling it has one of the strongest driver line-ups in F1, even if impartial observers would doubtless argue that Hamilton and George Russell at Mercedes takes some beating. Ferrari knows that, on balance, Leclerc is quicker, in qualifying and race, but recognises Sainz is much more than a number two, more than capable of keeping Leclerc on his toes, winning races and mounting his own challenge in the right circumstances.

“I’m comfortable,” Sainz says. “I’m happy in Ferrari. I trust the team. And I see positive steps being taken in the right direction. I see a committed team working in the right direction.

“And I’ve always said, I’m happy here and that the winter was going to be a good time to sit down and see if we can come to an agreement for the future. Which, if they’re happy with me, and I’m happy with them, shouldn’t be too much of a problem.”

Photo by: Glenn Dunbar / Motorsport Images

Although Sainz hasn't always had things his own way at Ferrari, he feels content and settled in the team

Who goes where for 2025?

As the 2023 season moves to a close, Ferrari’s future driver plans seem to be taking a recognisable shape. The team was always set on keeping Leclerc, and he on staying, despite interest from rivals including Aston Martin. Sainz’s future was less clear through the mid-summer, but Ferrari’s feelings as
the season came to its run-in were to keep him, too, after both drivers’ contracts expire in 2024.

Regardless, there is the potential for plenty of movement in
the driver market at the end of next year. Among the top teams, Verstappen is locked into Red Bull until the end of 2027 and Hamilton and Russell at Mercedes to the end of 2025. At McLaren, Lando Norris is contracted to the end of 2025 and Oscar Piastri a year later, following his impressive rookie season.

But the second Red Bull seat, where Sergio Perez is looking vulnerable, is open. Fernando Alonso is out of contract at Aston Martin at the end of next season. And there are two potentially attractive seats at what is currently called Alfa Romeo, but which
by 2026 will be the new Audi factory team.

Seidl is known to be interested in
both Sainz and Norris, both of whom impressed him when they
were working together

Audi’s Formula 1 effort is being run by Andreas Seidl, the
former McLaren team principal. Seidl is known to be interested in
both Sainz and Norris, both of whom impressed him when they
were working together. Could one of them yet be tempted by an Audi drive, even if
it’s likely not to be competitive immediately?

Alonso’s future is also intriguing. He is still operating at an exceedingly high level, but he will be 43 next year, which is a psychological barrier for a team, even if he feels age hasn’t withered him. And it means Aston Martin would be committing to a driver who will be 44 halfway through the 2025 season if it keeps him.

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On current performance, there’s no reason not to. But some might see that as a leap of faith. The sort of which Alpine wasn’t prepared to make last year, which is exactly why Alonso left.

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

Could Seidl's new Audi project be appealing for his former McLaren colleagues Sainz or Norris?