Sainz “should have gone to Red Bull”

In brief

Sainz “should have gone to Red Bull” – Norris

After Williams announced that it had signed Carlos Sainz Jnr to partner Alexander Albon at the team for the 2025 season, Lando Norris said he would have liked to have seen his former McLaren team mate move to the Red Bull seat currently occupied by Sergio Perez instead.

“I don’t know what their [Williams] plans are,” Norris told Sky.

“Honestly, the easy one is just to say Red Bull – he should have gone there, in in my eyes. Obviously, I’m biased – I know Carlos more than I know Checo, but Carlos deserves a lot. He’s one of the best drivers in Formula 1. He’s proven that countless times. And I’m a good friend of his. I’m happy for him that he’s still in Formula 1, I’m still happy that he got a drive and that he can try and bring Williams back up.

“Him partnering Alex, I think it would be good for Formula 1 at the same time – so that’s a good thing. But I’m sure a lot of people would love to say that he should have gone to Red Bull, potentially. But that’s, not my decision to make.”

High upgrade rate sign of Mercedes’ improvement – Shovlin

Mercedes’ trackside engineering director, Andrew Shovlin, says the team’s increased rate of bringing upgrades to their car in 2024 reflects the team’s improvement this season.

“The rate of them [upgrades] is really high at the moment, Shovlin said. “Which is just a feature of how well the organisation’s working.

“A lot of success in Formula 1 is about learning and it’s about ideas and at the moment the rate of learning has been high this year, the generation of ideas has been good. And ultimately that’s where all the new parts and new developments come from.”

Crawford craving more consistency

Aston Martin development driver Jak Crawford says he wants to find more consistency over the final four rounds of the Formula 2 season.

The DAMS driver sits fifth in the championship after the Spa-Francorchamps round on 100 points. He says he wants to score more regularly than he has been and that will be his focus over the summer break.

“From my side, I think it’ll be about about how can we be more consistent over the rounds,” he said.

“We have a bad round where we score zero points and then we have a round where we’re fighting for a win in the feature race and then we…