Carlos Sainz believes last weekend’s Mexico City Grand Prix was “quite a turning point” in the battle for third place in the Constructors’ Championship between Ferrari and McLaren.
Prior to the race in Mexico, McLaren headed the fight by 4.5 points.
However, a strong outing for Ferrari and a difficult showing for McLaren last Sunday swung the battle in Ferrari’s favour, who now holds a 13.5 point gap in third place.
With just four races remaining in the 2021 campaign, Ferrari is now analysing how it can stay ahead, having spent much of the season chasing McLaren.
“We need to see how we go from chasing to now being chased,” Sainz said.
“I think it’s quite a bit of a turning point in the battle. We are finally ahead and we are looking a bit at what McLaren is doing.
“Before we were always pushing to try and catch them and they’ve been very strong all season, and now we need to see how we can keep this momentum up that we’ve been through the past weekends and keep it going through until the last four races of the season.
“It’s always tight, every weekend is super tight. Even if you look at Mexico, it’s not like we out-qualified them by much.
“It was two milliseconds or something like that with Daniel [Ricciardo] and he was ahead of us in Turn 1 so he would have probably finished the race ahead.
“I think Austin was a tenth in quali so it’s so tight so I think it’s going to be a great battle until the end of the year.”
However, Sainz expects that McLaren will have the upper hand over Ferrari this weekend in Sao Paulo.
“Our numbers say so [that McLaren will be faster],” Sainz said. “We have our simulations and expectations from the sims and due to characteristics and all that, we put them something like half a tenth in front of us, not more than that.
“Now is this simulation as precise as telling it is half a tenth? Obviously not, it could be a tenth here or a tenth there, up or down.
“It’s going to be tight for sure. I think it just makes it more exciting and obviously with the podium of [Pierre] Gasly here in 2019, AlphaTauri will be in the mix and they will also be there.”
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