CLOSING THE TEAM-MATE GAP

The way the 2022 Formula 1 season has played out has rather removed the sting from certain intra-team battles. At Red Bull, Max Verstappen has put Sergio Perez in the shade to the same extent that got Pierre Gasly and Alex Albon dropped. But with both titles basically in the bag, this hasn’t mattered. At Mercedes, the challenge of recovering from the W13’s deficiencies has squashed any potential for flare-ups between Lewis Hamilton and George Russell. Lando Norris has again flattened Daniel Ricciardo at Mclaren.

At Ferrari, the fight between Charles Leclerc and

Carlos Sainz has made headlines. They get on very well off track, but that matters little on the delicate subject of team orders. On this, Ferrari came in for criticism for the time it spent to swap its cars at Silverstone, where late in the race it tried to get Sainz to cover for its safety car tyre-strategy gaffe with Leclerc.

Ultimately, the potential points lost from not firmly backing Leclerc in Britain has not mattered, due to Verstappen’s supremacy. But given this is his first year in the spotlight of an F1 title fight, it’s worth asking: how good is Carlos Sainz? In terms of pure pace, Autosport’s supertimes calculations put Leclerc and his nine poles on top, 0.114% away from the theoretical perfection of producing the quickest lap time at each race weekend. World champion Verstappen is shaded by just 0.067%, with Sainz 0.212% adrift of Leclerc in third. Sergio Perez is 0.684% off Leclerc, and 0.617% back from Verstappen.

So, on qualifying pace Sainz can be said to be providing Ferrari with a better-balanced driver line-up than Red Bull has. After coming up 0.057s from pole in Japan – the fourth time in 2022 he’d lost out by under 0.1s – Sainz said he was “fed up” of just missing out. He’s also produced stunning race pace, such as in Canada while pressuring Verstappen and coming through the pack in France. Sainz took his Silverstone victory with great aplomb, but that race also exposed what is the key takeaway from his season.

He closed the gap to Leclerc that he had been frank in discussing early in 2022: that he wasn’t as comfortable in taming the Ferrari’s lairy rear-end instability. Leclerc and Verstappen did this naturally, but Sainz initially struggled to even understand why he wasn’t adapting so well.

He is fast enough to win races and claim poles, but Leclerc just has the edge – as was the case at Silverstone, even with a damaged front wing. And Sainz’s lack of confidence sliding between the walls in the wet in Singapore while his team-mate was flinging his car around charging at Sergio Perez was particularly jarring.

Sainz isn’t one of F1’s valiant-but-doomed number twos – at least not yet – as was the case for Valtteri Bottas against Hamilton and Perez is now with Verstappen. He’s somewhere in between there and superstardom. That can change in 2023 too, but to do so Sainz needs to be the one setting the pace rather than falling further away.