Carlos Sainz has described Ferrari’s decision to conduct experiments at Formula 1’s British Grand Prix as an “investment” to help solve its issues over “the long term”.
Ferrari has been unable to capitalise on an encouraging opening to a campaign which comprised two wins in nine events as it has endured a sudden slump in results.
The Italian marque has achieved one podium in the previous five races as updates accelerated to Barcelona last month have triggered recurring high-speed bouncing.
Ferrari’s setback prompted the side to run a comparison between the two specs in practice at Silverstone and both cars completed the weekend using the older parts.
But like team-mate Charles Leclerc, Sainz has revealed Ferrari elected to hamper its prospects in the short term in order to improve its competitiveness down the line.
“I see Silverstone as an investment,” Sainz said in Budapest earlier this week.
“We invested probably not optimizing the Silverstone weekend, because you spend FP1 and FP2 comparing floors and not having your team-mate as a reference to optimize the car and
the car performance, to potentially making yourselves faster in five or six races time when we can learn what we can apply from Silverstone into the wind tunnel and apply it for the future.
“Already for Hungary we have a small upgrade [a revised floor] that hopefully makes things better.
“But Silverstone was an investment and hopefully improving the car a bit more in the medium and longer term.”
Sainz has divulged that Ferrari engineers even told the drivers in advance that increased bouncing could be an unintended consequence from its latest developments.
“I’m fairly confident given the fact that the team warned us that the new floor could produce more bouncing and it did,” he added.
“So it sounds like we understood that that could be a possibility and it happened like our simulations were suggesting.
“And our simulations are suggesting that our upgrade should have less, so I’m hopeful that at least our tools are telling us the right things and that we’re finding the right way again.”
Sainz hinted post-Silverstone that Ferrari could again revert to using the pre-Barcelona spec SF-24 to tackle the high-speed Spa-Francorchamps circuit next weekend.
However, the outgoing Ferrari driver has conceded that it wouldn’t be an ideal solution in the remaining races to change floors depending on the track characteristics.
“I don’t think that’s how a team should operate,” he retorted.
“I think the baseline platform of the car should be the same for every circuit and you shouldn’t be choosing floors depending on the track characteristics.”
Meanwhile, Sainz has claimed that he highlighted bouncing as a hindrance to Ferrari’s competitiveness during internal discussions even prior to the recent upgrades.
Asked whether it was essential that Ferrari experienced this hitch with its upgrades, Sainz replied: “This is obviously debatable. I have my own theory about it.
“I have been complaining about bouncing before the upgrade, so… Yeah, I don’t want to comment.”
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