Sainz had to “completely change” F1 driving style to get on top of 2022 Ferrari

The Spaniard had hoped to hit the ground running this year after a strong first season with Ferrari in 2021 where he had few problems adapting to his new surroundings.

However, Sainz found himself on the back foot in the early stages of the campaign as he could not get as comfortable with the F1-75 as teammate Charles Leclerc.

That left him a couple of tenths adrift of Leclerc from the off, as he and his Ferrari engineers set about chasing solutions to try to get him more at one with the car.

Despite numerous set-up experiments, no changes delivered the breakthrough that Sainz needed, so it was only a complete rethink of his approach to driving the car that helped him turn things around.

Speaking exclusively to Motorsport.com, Sainz said the situation he faced in the early races was tough to endure because it was something he had never experienced in his career before.

“It was clearly, first of all, frustrating after such a first strong year with the team, where I found very few issues with the car,” he said.

“I felt like, after the first few races in 2021, I knew where the limit of the car was. I only had to find one or two tenths in a certain type of corner and I was ready to compete. That’s why the second half of the season was so strong and I could get on top of it.

“This year was finally a competitive car, finally a car able to battle for wins, and suddenly I find myself in a position that I’ve never found myself before, which is being a bit more than two tenths off.

“I’ve never been more than two tenths off a teammate, and I’m scratching my head to see where is all this lap time coming from. It was frustrating, because it was the first time I had a competitive car that could allow me to fight for wins.”

While Sainz has previously been reluctant to explain how he finally produced a step forward in Canada, prior to taking his maiden pole position and victory at the British Grand Prix, he has finally opened up on how he had to take it upon himself to do things differently.

“I kept it quite secret where my struggles came from” he said. “I think people who understand the sport, and people who do in-depth analysis, more or less know me by now, and know where the issues came from. But just to make it short: I had to change completely my driving style.

“I had to change completely the way I was driving, in a very unnatural way. I had to change to an unnatural way and make it natural: which takes a long time.

“I also had to try things with setup. Most of them were in the wrong direction, and then coming back to find a good direction, and this takes races. There’s no testing anymore, so you need to test in race weekends.

“That means sometimes you have to commit to a race weekend with a setup where you basically got it wrong for that weekend. And it meant another weekend not performing.

“That accumulated frustration until I think it was more or less Canada that I found a bit my way. And since then, I’ve started…