Sainz sees big challenge in Belgium: 'It will be spectacular'

Carlos Sainz has not yet been on the podium this year and he wants to change that in Belgium. However, the 28-year-old driver knows that will be a challenge, as there will be limited time to arrive at a good set-up for the rest of the weekend in the tricky conditions.

"It’s a car that is difficult to predict so I don't know how it's going to perform but I hope we can do well," Sainz told GPblog and others in Spa. Weather conditions are treacherous in the Ardennes over the next few days and there is only one free practice session to properly tune the SF23. So an extra challenge for Ferrari.

Sainz is curious to see whether his team will be able to perform better than in Britain and Hungary. Yet at this stage, there is little meaningful to say. "I think everyone is, sprint weekend, only 60 minutes practice, one of the most difficult tracks to set up a car with, ride heights, stiffnesses and they give us only 60 minutes and it will probably be wet so we will not even know how to set up the car if the race is dry on Sunday so they've chosen quite honestly a very tricky circuit to go for a sprint. It's going to be spectacular because I think it could offer some good racing but also tricky from the set up and preparation."

Spa safety

Last year, modifications were made to Spa-Francorchamps to make the circuit even safer, but despite this, another driver died this year after a racing accident. Has enough been done to ensure driver safety?

"I might differ a bit here, I don't think the track lacks any safety attributes despite the changes they've done over the years have made the track a lot safer," Sainz believes. The driver born in Madrid thinks the deaths of Antoine Hubert and Dilano van 't Hoff had more to do with weather conditions than with the layout of the circuit. Therein lies a task for the race organisers. "I think it's unfortunate what happened with Antoine but it's more due to the conditions what happened last time, a month ago here and the fact that could happen in any category, in any race track in the world and there is no visibility, when a car spins in the middle of a straight we all cannot see nothing, it's down to luck, you take the car or you run over it. This is why before green flagging a session, before green flagging a race, a restart of the race where the cars are so close banded up you need to be really sure that it's not down to luck whether we're going to see an accident."