Ferrari has had a mixed first half of the season. While the Scuderia has occasionally battled for the podium, Ferarri have also recorded lesser results. According to Carlos Sainz, it is very difficult to say where the car is working well and where it is not.
The Italian team has lost ground compared to last year. In 2022, they were still easily second and could even compete for the world title at the start of the season. Now everything is different. Ferrari is fourth in the constructors' championship, and their car often falls short of a podium finish. They seem to be closer to the competition one weekend than the next.
Sainz also sees the inconsistency of the Ferrari: "It's very difficult to predict which circuits we're going to be quick and which we're not going to be quick. I think the best example was the difference between Hungary and Spa. I think when you see our car, we expected Hungary to be a good weekend. We expected Spa to be a weaker one, and was actually the opposite, which shows that there is maybe something intrinsical that we don't fully understand and we cannot predict very well."
Half the season is already over, and Ferrari does not yet seem to be able to fully understand the car. However, Sainz is not giving up: "It's not a secret, since we were in Bahrain testing, we saw something in our car that we didn't fully comprehend, and we honestly, and very quickly, identified what the main weakness of the car is. And this we know. Then there's other things like predicting which tracks you're going to be better on than others. There's the wind sensitivity. There's the track temperature sensitivity that we have, which, at the moment, makes it a very picky car. "
"But what we want is to understand exactly the reasons for that. I think we're doing a pretty good job at trying completely different things and having different theories that we're putting together for next year's car. And, hopefully, next year, it pays off. And at the moment, we can only focus on that and doing everything we can," the Spaniard says.