Carlos Sainz has claimed that the gains Ferrari has made with its latest Formula 1 upgrades are being cancelled out by the high-speed bouncing the team is enduring.
Ferrari’s encouraging campaign has unravelled in recent races as it has gone from being Red Bull’s closest competitor to slipping behind both McLaren and Mercedes.
Sainz managed to capitalise on team-mate Charles Leclerc making an error on his last Q3 run and Oscar Piastri having a lap time deleted to end up fourth on the grid.
However, Sainz has hinted that the returning bouncing issue that he revealed was hampering Ferrari in Spain again contributed to his five-tenth deficit to pole position.
While he’s insisted the developments have delivered what Ferrari anticipated, Sainz is convinced the problem is preventing it from extracting the SF-24’s new potential.
“I think we see it working in all the places where we have no bouncing,” Sainz said regarding Ferrari’s Spanish GP updates.
“But then if you trigger bouncing in the high-speed and you have to back off, then maybe what you win in some places you lose in the other.
“And the more high-speed content there is at a track, obviously that trade goes towards being worse for that circuit because the more high-speed you have, obviously the slower you are.
“It is not ideal, but the team is pushing flat out back at home to try and solve the issue and see how we can come back stronger in Silverstone.”
The Spaniard has conceded that Ferrari’s struggles are compounded as high-speed sections remain the area where it is weakest compared to its immediate rivals.
“Without going too much into detail, I think it’s a combination of we’re not good in high-speed corners,” he explained.
“And, at the same time, we are bouncing which makes our high-speed exaggeratedly slow.
“So here Turn 7, Turn 9, we lose a tenth from Max in each of the corners, only in one corner and it’s very difficult to crawl that back.
“The rest of the track we are almost equal in the slow speed.
“But we’re working already back at home to try and understand this new package and the bouncing that we have with it, and how we can improve it for Silverstone.”
However, Sainz has accepted that Ferrari’s third consecutive weekend on the backfoot demonstrates that it has dropped back in relative terms to the competition.
“Very tricky. Very tricky weekend,” he expressed. “We don’t seem like we have nailed recently these last couple of races. We seem to be struggling a little bit.
“We seem definitely to be a step behind Red Bull and McLaren in the fight with Mercedes in the race.
“In the Sprint and in quali, I felt like maybe they had a bit the edge over us, but we did some changes going into quali that made maybe the car faster, but also a bit more on the edge.
“It was very tricky out there to put a lap together. But happy because I think did a decent lap and we are in P4, which if you would have told me before quali, I would have taken it.”
