Carlos Sainz admits that Ferrari is “relatively concerned” over its reliability amid its poor start to the 2023 campaign.
At the season-opening race in Bahrain, Charles Leclerc stopped on track while running in third place, denying the Monegasque driver a podium.
Throughout the event in Sakhir, Leclerc was fitted with two Control Electronics components and then took a third in Saudi Arabia, which resulted in a 10-place grid penalty.
Despite its concerns, Sainz expressed confidence that the issue will not linger for long.
“For sure we are relatively concerned,” he said.
“It’s not the way you want to start a season with a penalty in race two, and break in the battery, the ECU in the first weekend and clearly we are not happy with that.
“We identified as a weakness but this is the first time we’ve seen this failure in a very, very long time so it caught us by surprise.
“We’re putting things in place to fix it and I’m pretty sure that we are capable of fixing that in the short term.
“So yeah, it’s a bad, bad situation but now we can only look forward and improve it.”
Ferrari entered the 2023 season with hopes of challenging for the title after showing promising form early on in the 2022 campaign.
However, Red Bull has been the class of the field at the first two races, cruising to victories ahead of the rest of the competition.
Speaking about Ferrari’s lack of pace to start the year, Sainz said: “I think it’s simply a sign that there’s someone out there just doing a bit of a better job than us and that we need to raise the bar.
“But while we are raising the bar every year and becoming a stronger team, the others are doing the same.
“It’s not only how much you can progress from one year to another, it’s how much you can progress relative to the rest of the field. And I’ve been in Ferrari three years and the progress I’ve seen inside the team from 2021 to 2023 is huge.
“It’s just so far it hasn’t been enough to beat either Red Bull or Mercedes. 2021, we were P3, last year we were P2.
“And now, obviously, the start of the season has been tough and we’ve faced issues with race pace and reliability that we honestly didn’t expect to face and it caught us a bit out of guard, but we’re putting everything in place to make sure it doesn’t happen.
“And I think the right exam has to be done a bit more later in the year and towards the end of the year, because also one other area where I think it’s important is development and the capacity to improve the mistakes that you do.
“I think we’re going to do a good job this year on development, that we have a very clear target of what we need to improve from the car, the car is responding exactly same as in the wind tunnel.”
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