RACING UNDER A CLOUD
THREE DRIVERS BEGAN THIS SEASON ALREADY KNOWING THEY WOULD BE MOVING ELSEWHERE FOR NEXT YEAR. SO WHAT’S IT LIKE TO BE CARLOS SAINZ, DANIEL RICCIARDO OR SEBASTIAN VETTEL, RACING FOR A TEAM YOU’LL BE LEAVING – AND NOT NECESSARILY IN THE MOST AMICABLE WAY?
ONE OF THE MANY JOYS FORMULA 1 FANS
have been forced to forego in 2020 is the ‘silly season’, that annual frenzy of speculation over which out-of-contract driver will end up where. This year the biggest, most significant moves were tied up long before the season began. And while it’s not unprecedented for a driver to telegraph their departure more than a season in advance – Fernando Alonso announced his move from Renault to Mclaren at the tail end of 2005 – it’s rare indeed for three big names to be serving out their notice period thus.
Carlos Sainz set the dominoes toppling by signing a 2021 contract with Ferrari, which subsequently announced that it hadn’t even bothered to open renewal negotiations with Sebastian Vettel. Daniel Ricciardo, meanwhile, gleefully bagged the Mclaren seat vacated by Sainz, a move that prompted the team principal of his current employer, Renault, to issue a huffy and rebarbative statement about the virtues of commitment and being a team player – or not, in this case.
For these three men, then, this promises to be an even more unusual season than it is for everyone else in F1. Drivers whose departure is formalised at the conventional time, with but a handful of races left to run, can generally expect at the very least for a kind of smiling exclusion to prevail, as their soon-to-be-ex-employer shuts them out of technical briefings and such. F1 teams are close-knit communities and the perception of disloyalty – or the feeling that a driver is on his way out, a lost cause – can foment distrust or complacency within the garage.
Renault team principal Cyril Abiteboul alluded to this in his veiled dig at Ricciardo: “In our sport, and particularly within the current extraordinary situation, reciprocated confidence, unity and commitment are, more than ever, critical values for a works team.”
Carlos Sainz and his management team nimbly and diplomatically avoided this scenario by engaging with Mclaren’s leadership before opening talks with Ferrari, enabling Mclaren to sound out potential replacements well in advance. By contrast Ricciardo wrongfooted Renault, leaving its leaders exposed and looking like mugs.
“I wouldn’t say it’s been surprisingly easy because it’s no surprise – I know them [the team management],” says Sainz. “It’s been easy going, you know. I think they perfectly understand my position. I perfectly understand their position. There was always a lot of clarity, a lot of honesty on what was going on, and no hiding of any kind of negotiation.
“We were being clear to each other to make sure none of us would end up being upset or on the back foot. I owe a lot of this to Zak [Brown, Mclaren CEO] because he’s been the one that trusted me in 2018 when I signed for Mclaren. He put the faith in me, we had a very successful 2019, and that is probably what gave me the passport to have the option of going to Ferrari. I’m very grateful to all of this team and at the same time obviously very excited about the future.”
There are no signs of rancour at Mclaren, nor that Sainz is being disadvantaged in favour of team-mate Lando Norris, although Norris did secure an opportunistic podium in the season opener through a strategy that required Sainz to obey team orders. There have been incidents of ‘finger trouble’ at pitstops that have scuppered races for Sainz, but only the conspiracy-minded would view these as deliberate, and on each occasion the team has flagellated itself for the blunder. After the Styrian Grand Prix, for instance, where Sainz started third but finished a delayed ninth, team principal Andreas Seidl publicly apologised. Points are what Mclaren wants this season, not destabilised and demotivated drivers.
“With this team I would say the idea is very clear,” says Sainz. “We have a target every year, clear intentions of how much we want to improve the car, which areas we’re weak as a team, and which areas we’re strong. We have very clear indications of where we need to improve and this team is in a very healthy position, performance-wise, right now, because even if we haven’t done the jump of Racing Point – gaining one or two seconds – we’ve done a little half a second step. We’re not lost. We know what we’ve done to the development of the car. And we have a very clear path and very clear targets.
“We’ve taken out that pressure [of expectation, given Mclaren’s history], we’ve been honest about our position in the drivers’ and constructors’ championships. We knew we needed to finish fourth in the constructors’ last year, and this year to try and match that or potentially improve it, even though it’s going to be very difficult.”
Given the current climate in which the sport’s commercial revenues have taken a beating, constructors’ championship placings have assumed an even greater significance than before. Each position gained means a bigger share of what will be a much smaller pot. Renault may not be under the same financial pressures as Mclaren, but it remains answerable to a parent company unlikely to tolerate much more slippage from its stated targets. It too is desperate to finish fourth or better.
To that end, Ricciardo shows no sign of being shuffled down Renault’s list of priorities. Perhaps the tensions have been eased by the team’s
high-profile recruitment of Fernando Alonso to replace him. And for all that Alonso has added his voice to those saying this season and the next are, in effect, ‘zombie’ years of Mercedes dominance before a major rules reset, the midfield battle will remain every bit as intense as it is now. Renault needs to carry on putting its weight behind Ricciardo because he is its main contender for big points at the moment – in the opening races Esteban Ocon simply hasn’t been able to extract the maximum from the car in qualifying, consigning him to slogging for scraps from indifferent grid positions.
If Sainz and Ricciardo are on safe ground in terms of status and competitiveness this season, Vettel is anything but. The opening tranche of races aptly summed up where Ferrari is, competitively speaking, and how it must mitigate the weaknesses of the SF1000 – many of which are now ‘baked in’ for 2021, given the development restrictions agreed in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. These mitigations have taken the car in a direction that has enabled Charles Leclerc to elevate it beyond its natural place in the pecking order, but left Vettel struggling. Ferrari appears to be comfortable with this, a situation which would not have prevailed last season, when Vettel was its stated team leader.
That Ferrari has been pegged back massively on engine power – after its ‘confidential settlement’ with the FIA – is beyond doubt, for its customer teams are also struggling for want of grunt. Lack of downforce had been a shortcoming of the SF1000’S predecessor and the new car seemed to have overcome that, but at the cost of carrying more drag. The combination of this and reduced power proved ruinous in the opening triple-header, Leclerc’s lucky podium in Austria notwithstanding.
Ferrari has sought to address this with a low-downforce package it introduced at Silverstone, but only Leclerc was able to cope with the twitchiness that ensued (during qualifying both Ferraris had to feather the throttle at Copse, for instance, when even the Williams could go through there flat out). Vettel had a hopeless British GP weekend, complaining twice about debris rattling around in the cockpit, labouring to a lowly grid position, then spending much of the race outside the top 10 while Leclerc arguably outperformed the car. A week later Vettel spun to the back of the field on the opening lap and toiled to 12th, publicly berating Ferrari for its
“IN A TEAM LIKE MCLAREN OR FERRARI, WHERE THE HISTORY AND THE HERITAGE MEANS YOU’RE ONLY HAPPY IF YOU’RE WINNING, YOU HAVE TO ACCEPT THAT MAYBE YOU’RE GONNA GO THROUGH A TOUGH COUPLE OF YEARS” CARLOS SAINZ
strategy choices and earning a rebuke from team principal Mattia Binotto.
There was also a suspicion Vettel’s race may have been compromised to assist Leclerc’s, for he was brought into the pits for a second pitstop after just 11 laps on new hard-compound tyres, which had plenty of life left in them. At the time, the one-stopping Leclerc was coming up behind him on track.
“My confidence is quite low at the moment,” says Vettel, “because I’m struggling to get a feel for the car. Every time I try and push, I lose the car.”
The trouble for Vettel over the remainder of this season is that he requires a car with a particular set of virtues, particularly a predictable and wellplanted back end, in order to perform at his best. He’s not going to get that, and his lack of confidence in the operation around him – as well as the car itself – is plainly visible.
While Vettel struggles to put himself in the shop window for future employers, his anointed replacement is enjoying a reasonably competitive car operated by a stable and well-run team with clear goals. But if Sainz has any misgivings about the wisdom of his move, he’s not letting on.
“When I signed with with Ferrari,” he says, “the last thing they knew is that they had stuck it on pole in the last few races of the season and they were fighting for wins at Monza and Spa. And I was obviously very excited about that going into 2021. And now after seeing where they are, it’s time to fix new objectives.
“Ferrari has definitely taken a bit of a step backwards. But when you’re in a team like Mclaren or Ferrari, where the history and the heritage means you’re only happy if you’re winning, you have to accept that maybe you’re gonna go through a tough couple of years.
“You need to put yourself in a mindset of wanting to win in the future, and what you need to do to help the team achieve that, because at the moment Mclaren, Ferrari and Renault aren’t where they belong, at the front of the grid. We just have an incredible group of people at Mercedes who are making everyone’s life very complicated, making it very difficult to be in F1, and I think it doesn’t matter what team you’re in, everybody has that target – to find an answer to Mercedes.”
If it didn’t really matter which team you were in, though, not one of these three would have moved. Sainz is an ambitious and gifted driver who saw an opportunity – possibly of the once-in-a-lifetime variety – to get into a racewinning car. Ricciardo is perhaps at a different point in his career, where that opportunity is behind him, and yet he has much to offer given the right car. The same might be said of Vettel even as Ferrari turns its back on him.
For all that the end of the 2020 season is not yet in sight, and the beginning of 2021 barely on the horizon, Sainz and Ricciardo – and perhaps even Vettel – are contemplating a more distant goal. The promise of 2022, and the new formula which may end Mercedes’ virtual monopoly on success, is what will sustain them through any choppiness in the months to come.