Sainz defends ’very fast’ teammate Leclerc

Carlos Sainz has jumped to the defence of his teammate Charles Leclerc, as some in Formula 1 wonder if Ferrari decided to oust the wrong driver for 2025.

It is Sainz, rather than Leclerc, who is being shunted out of the Maranello based team to make room for Lewis Hamilton next year - and it is Leclerc who is currently looking like the least impressive driver of the entire trio.

"We’ve had four really difficult races," Leclerc said in Hungary, having crashed in practice and then qualified a couple of tenths and positions behind Sainz.

The good news for Ferrari is that a tweaked floor at the Hungaroring appears to have solved the recent ’bouncing’ re-emergence. The bad news is that the McLarens and Max Verstappen’s Red Bulls are faster.

"They’re three or four tenths faster than us and that’s what we’ve been seeing for the last four weekends," said Sainz.

Amid the pre-Hungary ’bouncing’ problems, Leclerc had a sequence of poor personal results, which the Monaco-born driver thinks was not all his fault.

"It’s true that we went in very extreme directions in terms of setup to try to resolve our problems," he said. "I probably took a few too many risks in terms of settings to find a solution."

Even though he’s still a couple of tenths ahead of Leclerc, the job-seeking Sainz is not bitter or gloating. "It’s always the same with Charles," he told Spanish journalists on Saturday.

"There are races where he is in front and I accept it with dignity because I know he is a very fast driver. I also have my races where I go fast and now I have been driving at a very good level for a few years now," Sainz said.

"The good thing is that we’re always a tenth or two off each other - it never happens that we’re four or five tenths off. And I think that makes us a strong pair of drivers."

Sainz laments that Ferrari’s struggle to keep up with the frontrunners is not suddenly going to change in the week between Hungary and Spa-Francorchamps.

"This is a bit of what we have until we bring a good evolution, like McLaren and Red Bull did," he said. "They’re pushing hard at the factory and helping us in every way possible to make the car those three or four tenths faster than we need right now.

"But it takes time," Sainz added. "Obviously, right now, after what we discovered in Barcelona, we have to go back, analyse, change things, there are limited hours in the wind tunnel - it takes time to design new parts."