Carlos Sainz reveals ‘main problem’ creating ‘less competitive’ Ferrari concerns

The two Ferrari drivers racing

Falling to fourth in the on-track pecking order after their Barcelona upgrade reintroduced porpoising, Carlos Sainz fears it could be costing Ferrari “even more” lap time than they think.

Ferrari accelerated their development programme after Canada’s double DNF and put an extensive upgrade on the track at the very next race in Spain.

Ferrari’s Barcelona upgrade reintroduced porpoising to their F1 car

Additional reporting by Thomas Maher

But instead of closing the gap to Red Bull and McLaren, who had also surged ahead, Ferrari found themselves lagging behind Mercedes too.

The “main problem”, as Sainz put it, is that porpoising is back and it’s costing the Spaniard and his team-mate Charles Leclerc lap time. Perhaps even more than Ferrari think.

“Bouncing 100 per cent costs you time, what I think is that it costs you even more time than you think,” he told the media including PlanetF1.com.

“Not only the time that you lose by the bouncing in a high-speed corner, but also the potential time that you might lose in other corners that you’re not bouncing.

“For sure it costs lap time, maybe even more than what we think.”

The important numbers ahead of the British Grand Prix

F1 2024: Head-to-head race statistics between team-mates

The updated Drivers’ and Constructors’ standings after the Austrian Grand Prix

Carlos Sainz adamant there is ‘potential’ in the Ferrari package

The Spaniard is adamant all is not lost as he firmly believes there is “potential” in the Ferrari package waiting to be unlocked.

But in order to do that, they need to understand if the Barcelona upgrade was a misstep or not.

“For sure this new package still has potential to be optimises, but in the short-term, we want to understand if we have taken a step in the right direction or not, because that will also help future development,” he said.

“This is now the number one priority for the team.

“We accept and realise that after Barcelona, we have been less competitive than before Barcelona and this obviously raises ours concerns about the package and we certainly need to try to understand as much as possible everything that is involved and we want to this exercise in the future.

“But at the same time, others are not standing still and are progressing exponentially. So we are trying to keep up with them.”

British summer rain could scupper Ferrari’s planned Friday test

In a bid to understand the upgrade, Ferrari have not brought new parts to the British Grand Prix with Charles Leclerc saying they hope to run tests in Friday’s practices.

That, though, could be scuppered by rain.

“There are no upgrades on the car,” said the six-time Grand Prix winner. “However, it’s obviously going to be very useful if it’s not raining. At the moment, it looks like it’s probably going to rain.

“So if it rains [on Friday] then maybe the test we wanted to do between both cars just to confirm a few things will have to be postponed to the next race.”

He added: “We are still trying to work out where we need to set up the car in order to maximise the potential of those upgrades.

“As I’ve said many times, the numbers that we were expecting from this upgrade are there. So the upgrade is working the way it should be.

“But it’s more about where you run the car to optimise those numbers that we see. For now we haven’t quite managed to do that so we are still working on that.”

Although Ferrari remain second in the Constructors’ Championship, their advantage over P3’s McLaren has been slashed to 23 points.

Read next: Follow PlanetF1.com’s WhatsApp channel for all the F1 breaking news!