Carlos Sainz says his first year at Ferrari doesn’t feel like his strongest season in Formula 1, admitting he is yet to put “a whole weekend together”.
Out of the drivers who moved teams for 2021, Sainz has been one of the standout performers, claiming two podium finishes in Monaco and Hungary.
At the halfway point in the season, Sainz sits sixth in the drivers’ championship one place ahead of his highly-rated Ferrari team-mate Charles Leclerc.
Although the Spaniard has made his best-ever start to a campaign in terms of points scored and is satisfied with his performances, Sainz felt he’d failed to “maximise” an entire weekend.
“I am happy with the way that I am integrating in the team and the first half of the season,” Sainz said, as quoted by Crash.net.
“I’m very happy, particularly with the speed I’ve had with the car and since race one I felt like I was on top of the car and I was able to push it to the limit and be on the pace straight away in pretty much every circuit I’ve been to.
“It doesn’t feel like my strongest season is F1 definitely, I feel like there’s a lot of points, a lot of missed opportunities here and there, I think I said that before this race that I feel like I haven’t maximised a weekend, yet as a Ferrari driver I haven’t put a whole weekend together.”
Despite another strong showing at the Hungaroring, Sainz suffered a crash in qualifying that lost him a potential high grid slot.
Sainz would finish fourth but moved up a position due to Sebastian Vettel’s disqualification for not providing a sufficient fuel sample, but saw his brush with the barriers in Q2 as a prime example of him not fully maximising a race weekend.
“And for some reason, maybe it’s just being part of a team, it just takes time, you know to maximise weekends,” Sainz added. “And this weekend, I think is the best example.
“I did a mistake in quali, I paid the price in the race. And there was one strange thing going on the pitstop that didn’t allow us to release, we missed a podium opportunity because of that, and all of a sudden the whole weekend doesn’t taste that good, you know, because I feel like we could have scored even better points.
“So this weekend is a very good example of how the first 10/11 races, have felt like with again, very good speed. In qualifying in S1 in FP3, but for some reason something didn’t quite go to plan and we ended up where we ended up.”
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