Carlos Sainz is struggling more than last year to understand how the Ferrari works, particularly in terms of using the tires. In 2023, the Scuderia had an F1 that degraded the tires more, but this season’s has a narrower performance peak.
“The trend this year is that we have a very narrow window for tires on our car” Sainz said. “Last year our car would turn the tires on when we wanted them to. This year it seems like there’s a very fine line between getting them to work in the right window or not.”
“I’m trying to figure this out from my side. I’m going to focus over the next few weeks to see what I can do over the last six races to make it less of a limitation or a weakness and make us perform better, because the racing pace is still strong so there is work to be done on that side.”
This narrower performance peak is obviously a problem for qualifying, as we saw in Singapore: “Obviously we have theories at the moment, but I think unless we do the ideal perfect lap, the risk of not having the tires in the right window is extremely difficult for us.
“And as soon as something happens that’s beyond our control, like having to weave through traffic, having to go slow in sector 2, having to queue at the end of pit lane, you’re a few degrees of the operating window, and there’s no grip, which surprised me and probably what surprised Charles in turn 1.”
“It doesn’t mean we have to make the mistakes I did, but at the same time it shows that we need to pay close attention to it. I hope that once we pay close attention to it , we will be able to qualify a little higher and, with our race pace, we will be able to fight.”
