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Sainz hoping McLaren have "turned a corner"

10:27, 18 Jan 2019

byAdam Newton

With the driver market dominated by talks of Ricciardo’s move to Renault and Gasly to Red Bull, Carlos Sainz’s move to McLaren has gone under the radar a little bit.

Sainz has taken the seat left by Fernando Alonso’s retirement, big footsteps to follow, but the Spaniard hopes that he could be helped by having a better car than McLaren did last year.

In a quote that we hope won’t go the same way as Alonso’s “now we can fight” from Australia last year, Sainz believes that McLaren have turned over a new leaf and are ready to compete.

He said at the Autosport show: “I’m quite sure that McLaren has hit a low point [in 2018] and they’re also going to get it better on the chassis so all those things combined. I expect to be in a better position with McLaren and hope and I think we have turned a corner.

“McLaren has a very clear plan which is hopefully in the near future is to go back to what McLaren has always been, which is a winning team. But it is a long term plan – we cannot get overexcited.

“We know we need to work hard, and we know that the team last year was really far away from [winning]. But we have sat down, we have seen together and know what we need to do to become bigger and stronger.”