Jeddah performance shows Ferrari have “a lot of work to do”

The second race of the season showed Ferrari are not as close to the pace as they thought they were, Carlos Sainz Jnr admitted.

Both the team’s drivers finished outside the top five yesterday, Sainz sixth ahead of team mate Charles Leclerc in seventh.

Both drivers were disadvantaged by the appearance of the Safety Car shortly after they made their first pit stops. “It wasn’t the best timing because we were out there on the medium over-cutting Stroll and starting to show a bit of a better pace after struggling a lot in dirty air behind Stroll,” Sainz explained. “But I honestly think the result wouldn’t have changed much.”

Sainz said the superior pace of the Red Bulls in the second half of the race underlined how far behind Ferrari are. “The last stint on the hard proves that we are not where we want to be, that we still deg[rade] more than the Mercs, we still deg more than the Astons and we lack a bit of race pace.”

Ferrari arrived in Jeddah hoping to be the closest rivals to Red Bull. “I’m a bit surprised because after Friday and before the weekend, I thought that we had a chance of being the second force here in Jeddah,” said Sainz.

“But I think that last stint on the hard proves that we still have a lot of work to do. We have a weakness in the race and that we need to wait for the developments to come to see if we can improve that weakness.”

Ferrari’s poor tyre management is exacerbated when they run in the slipstream of other cars, said Sainz.

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“Right now we are not where we want to be in terms of race pace and the car in general, the balance, even in dirty air following we just struggle a bit. If we already overheat the tyres in clean air, imagine following. We just eat them alive and we need clean air to produce some kind of decent lap time.

“We know exactly our weaknesses, this is a positive. Obviously we cannot do magic to bring the developments early, but I know the team is pushing flat out to bring them and this will improve our race pace for sure.”

Sainz indicated the team ran more downforce in Jeddah in an attempt to better manage their tyre degradation.

“We didn’t run as low drag in Bahrain. Actually we ran a very similar rear wing as in Bahrain and this is probably why we were not as fast on the straights as maybe in Bahrain. In Bahrain we were maybe lower downforce than the others, here we…