Has F1's fastest nomad finally found a home?
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Edd Straw | December 20, 2021 2:44 PM ET
When it comes to the 2023 driver market ‘silly season’, there’s one top team with a vacancy that will not be part of the rumor-mongering and uncertainty. While Ferrari and Carlos Sainz Jr have yet to formalize that they will continue together beyond next year, it is inconceivable that either will look elsewhere.
After all, why would they? Team principal Mattia Binotto said after the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix that they would sit down over the winter “to start discussing what our future can be”. Keeping hold of Sainz, who has integrated with the team so effectively this year, is a no-brainer for Ferrari. The only real question is likely to be exactly how long Ferrari wants to commit to Sainz, who was initially confirmed only for two years after moving to the team from McLaren ahead of 2020.
As for Sainz, when he joked in a recent press conference that he’s trying to work his way through driving for every F1 team, it reflected the fact Ferrari was his fourth employer in seven years. That’s unusually nomadic for a modern F1 driver, particularly one of Sainz’s quality, who has made his way from Toro Rosso to Renault (on loan from Red Bull) to McLaren and then Maranello since making his grand prix debut in 2015. But given he walked away from a McLaren team where he was very well-established to take on the Ferrari challenge, and has thrived, Sainz will be eager to secure a longer-term Ferrari future.
Yet for all that, Sainz hasn’t proved to be the driver Ferrari thought it had secured when they put pen to paper to recruit him. The deal was done ahead of the delayed start to the 2020 season at a point where Ferrari had decided to dispense with the services of Sebastian Vettel when his contract concluded at the end of the year. With Charles Leclerc having signed a five-year deal the previous year to keep him at Ferrari until the end of 2024, he was cast as the future of Ferrari with Sainz viewed as a good number two. Ferrari, of course, never explicitly intimated that, but reading between the lines of what Binotto had said about the partnership, it was clear Leclerc was seen as the star and Sainz as the wingman.
But even before Sainz walked through the Maranello gates, Ferrari started to realize it was getting more than it bargained for by signing the Spaniard. He had a strong 2020 campaign with McLaren; Ferrari particularly noting how much his qualifying had improved. That’s symptomatic of an intelligent, diligent competitor with a drive to improve himself continually – character traits that come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the career and character of his two-times world rally champion father, Carlos Sr.
When Sainz made the move from Toro Rosso to Renault, which happened four races before the conclusion of the 2017 ahead of a full year in ’18, it didn’t go as hoped. Having headed into ’18 expecting either to secure a longer-term deal at Renault or a return to Red Bull, he found both doors closing and made the move to McLaren for ’19. His full season with Renault in ’18 was his least convincing in F1 considering his experience at the time, but was a vital learning opportunity. Given how specialized modern F1 cars are, learning and mastering the baffling array of team-specific settings and how to make the most of the available tools such as diff maps and brake shapes is a long process. The scale of that challenge caught Sainz by surprise, but he’s not one to make the same mistake a second time.
That’s why when he moved to McLaren he put in a huge amount of work at its Woking headquarters, preparing, learning and ensuring that he had absorbed as much as he could before the start of the season. He took a similar approach when he moved to Ferrari, which proved more challenging given the restrictions created by the COVID-19 pandemic, that has paid dividends. As well as mileage in a 2018-specification Ferrari and the driver-in-loop simulator, Sainz devoted a huge amount of time to integration with personnel at the factory. Given the scale of the challenge, it allowed him to hit the ground at the start of the season if not running, then at least jogging.
Sainz, of course, came into 2021 focused on attempting to usurp Leclerc as the team’s lead driver. Again, that objective was not publicly stated – he’s too sharp to do that – but by becoming the perfect team player and delivering on track to a slightly higher standard than expected when he was signed, it was a realistic aspiration.