Motorsport Week sits down with the McLaren-bound Carlos Sainz Jr. for an in-depth chat about his Formula 1 journey so far, and his aspirations for the next chapter of his career.
There will be a third specification Carlos Sainz Jr. in Formula 1 next season.
Formula 1 has so far witnessed the upstart who excelled for Toro Rosso – both before and after Max Verstappen was plucked to Red Bull – and then the version who contested 25 Grands Prix for Renault as part of an ultimately short-term loan arrangement. Next season will be the third chapter in Formula 1 for the erudite Spaniard, who is already rapidly hurtling towards a century of Grands Prix at the tender age of 24. The Toro Rosso stint is firmly in the past, the Renault episode has now reached its conclusion, but the next instalment takes Sainz Jr. to Woking, ostensibly as the lead driver tasked with reinvigorating the fortunes of a once-great team in need of rejuvenation.
Sainz Jr. has been a consistent performer in Formula 1. After a promising but disjointed rookie campaign he finished his next three seasons with 46, 54 and 53 points on the board respectively, annihilating Daniil Kvyat before faring well – if not outstandingly – against the rapid and experienced Nico Hulkenberg. But it’s fair to say 2018 was a mixed bag. Sainz Jr.’s form, particularly in qualifying, fluctuated, while overall in race trim he trailed Hulkenberg once too often – the caveat being that his strongest events were nixed by mechanical issues. And, perhaps emphasising the contradictory nature of Formula 1’s topsy-turvy midfield, strong results did not necessarily come off the back of stunning performances – and vice versa.
“On a personal level it has been quite a challenging one,” explains the softly-spoken Sainz Jr. “Especially because it took me a bit of time at the beginning to understand the car, to understand how to go as fast as I could with this car. Then as soon as I understood it for me it was a big confidence boost and the results started coming. Although I’m not entirely happy with the amount of points I got in my good weekends. We all have those four, five, six weekends where you perform at the highest level that you know you extract the absolute maximum out of the car, but somehow either reliability reason or strategy thing didn’t allow me to extract it. In Baku [where Sainz Jr. finished fifth] I wasn’t happy with the car balance, I just did a really good race without having the car underneath. Probably my best whole race weekend was Suzuka. I got a point. I feel that weekend I extracted everything there was from that car, I overtook four or five people in the race, it was a difficult weekend for the team but I still managed to bring home one point. It gave the team a bit of a motivation boost for the rest of the season. We were all very down. The day you perform at the highest level you need your car to be best of the rest. Sometimes this year I think I performed my best level but the car wasn’t P7 so I didn’t get that many points. Or I was at my best level and my car was P7 but the car did not finish. To win the points, the midfield battle, you need that kind of luck where you’re performing highly and one Red Bull and one Ferrari crash and you finish P5 and get a lot of points, like in Baku. You need that kind of luck and balance to achieve a lot of points in the midfield.”
Sainz Jr. copped the wrath of Red Bull management through 2017 for his public desire to extricate himself from Toro Rosso, but deserves credit for wanting to embrace a new opportunity and take a plunge. After all, it was a gamble – he could have stayed put and waited for a chance at Red Bull. But he took the chance with Renault and, with hindsight, accepts it was a greater challenge than initially expected.
“It was very easy for me to go fast straight away, but to extract the last two-tenths was the challenging part, to be extremely fast, which is what you need to be to beat a guy like Nico, or to qualify P7 in every race, or to qualify in the top eight in every race,” he ponders.
“I had done a three-year period, which is a lot, in a car, in a team, with a certain driving style, with a certain approach, with a certain way of doing things, so to change after a three-year period to in a one-year period extract the maximum out of our package… was tough. But this is something that made me a better driver: to know how to react to that, to know what to ask from the team, to know what I needed as a driver, what I needed the team to give me to become faster and I take a bit of pride from that because it would have been easy to give up a bit early in the season but I kept pushing, kept trusting in my abilities and it did end up coming.”
Sainz Jr. will head to McLaren with the advantage of grasping the different operational approach from two different teams – of relative Italian minnows Toro Rosso and the Anglo-French manufacturer-backed Renault effort. That, surely, will be of enormous assistance when tasked with assisting McLaren’s drive up the grid.
“Moving to Renault has been a great experience for me and going to a team like McLaren with similar resources is going to help me,” he outlines. “This year of experience… also getting to know myself, because I only knew the Carlos of Toro Rosso, what he liked in a Toro Rosso, but going to another team what I needed as a driver, the good things of the Toro Rosso [driver to] try and apply them in the Renault, keep the good things from Renault and try to nurse them together into the Toro Rosso ones. There’s a lot of stuff going on that you can do as a driver, and the amount of learning that I’ve done this year is something that I’m really taking into McLaren and a great experience. I’m interested in seeing how the Carlos of next year [is], having his first two-year contract, being fully part of a team. I’m not saying at Renault I didn’t behave like that. I’m interested to see how the Carlos of next year goes into the first race.”
Next year, of course, is the big unknown. McLaren harboured ambitions of edging clear of the midfield in 2018 but instead it had only the seventh-fastest package, and on more than one occasion was slowest. It was a humiliating season that led to some deep-rooted internal analysis, managerial changes, and an organisational reshuffle. Senior figures are now accepting of its plight and appreciate that recovery to where it wants to be will take years. This is the environment into which Sainz Jr. is stepping.
“I am in a two-year commitment with them,” Sainz Jr. says of McLaren. “I want, as a driver, but also as a fan because I am a McLaren fan, to see the team going forward. So, if we manage to get a good first year next year, and a good head start on how things are going to evolve, I really think I can create a family out of McLaren and spend a few years there. That’s my target at the moment. I’m going there going year-by-year, but also thinking about trying to be one of the key factors helping McLaren go back to the top. McLaren are perfectly capable of that. That’s why I’m going there. I have a lot of trust in them I have a lot of trust in the second most successful ever F1 team. They’ve won, hopefully they will remember how to do it, and little by little in a mid-term project they will start going back to the top.” Part of that will need to come from engine supplier Renault delivering the necessary step, with Sainz Jr. quipping in Japan that Honda’s gains are “worrying” for the manufacturer, which has never got the better of Mercedes and Ferrari in the hybrid era. A strong Renault engine will be good news for McLaren. Whether such a situation arises is up in the air.
Barring a big team – of which are classified Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull – suffering an enormous setback with revised regulations, or the Red Bull/Honda partnership faltering, the rest are likely to be scrapping for fourth place in the Constructors’ Championship. But given the strength of the opposition it is by no means guaranteed that a rejuvenated McLaren would be in the pound seats if it avoids the fundamental aerodynamic mistakes it made with its MCL33 – and Sainz Jr. knows it.
“Next year we should fear everyone,” he says with unusually stark honesty for an F1 driver. “You think about Sauber, but then you think about Force India with a bit more budget, what they could be capable of. You think about Renault, what they are able to do. You think about Haas, if they keep getting the amount of Ferrari parts that they are getting and Ferrari keeps dominating, they should be also very strong. You think about McLaren with a whole new project and wanting to invest and wanting to go back to P4 in the championship after a difficult year. You think about all these teams, and you think anyone could lead the midfield battle next year.”
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