Carlos Sainz would be willing to support Charles Leclerc if his team-mate challenges for the Formula 1 title, despite his impending exit from Ferrari at the end of 2024.
Ferrari announced earlier this month that it had signed Lewis Hamilton to partner Leclerc from 2025, leaving Sainz without a drive lined up beyond the end of this year.
With Sainz having to continue with the Italian marque for the upcoming campaign, 1997 F1 champion Jacques Villeneuve has predicted that he won’t abide by the “team’s game”.
However, the Spaniard insists he will remain professional in the interests of Ferrari and would expect Leclerc to return the favour if he was the one fronting Ferrari’s charge.
Asked whether he would help Leclerc in a title battle if Ferrari asked him to, Sainz told media including Motorsport Week: “Of course.
“I’ve always been a team player, I’ll always be, every team that I’ve gone into in Formula 1, I’ve been I think a great team player. I’ve always been exemplary in that sense as a driver for any team.
“And yeah, I will definitely help Charles if I have to, in the same way I expect Charles to help me if I fight for a World Championship myself too.”
Sainz replaced four-time champion Sebastian Vettel at Ferrari in 2021, with the team capitalising on a regulation change the next season to emerge as a title contender.
But the Maranello-based squad endured a winless second half of the campaign as its competitiveness nosedived, which then carried into the opening stages of last term.
Ferrari rebounded with a mid-season concept change, however, to achieve the sole non-Red Bull win of the season with Sainz’s stellar triumph at the Singapore Grand Prix.
Although Sainz concedes Ferrari has a mammoth task to bridge what was a 454-point deficit, he is confident the team will be in contention to achieve more race victories.
“Regarding this year, I wish we can achieve more than one win,” he outlined. “I think that’s the target in the whole team, including me.
“I think we’ve done everything we can to close that gap to Red Bull even though Red Bull is going to come out super strong. I think Ferrari is capable of closing that gap and putting ourselves in the position of fighting for more wins. Whether we get them or not, let’s wait a little bit until Bahrain, let’s wait until the first race, see how competitive we are and I’ll tell you how competitive I think we will be this season.”
Ferrari has undergone a “complete revamp” with its 2024 challenger, the SF-24, which it hopes will provide both drivers with a more benign platform than its predecessor.
Sainz reveals that his optimism for Ferrari’s prospects this season derives from the strong manner in which it recovered from its troubles at the start of the previous season.
“I think we were very agile last year in identifying the weaknesses of last year’s car, and we’ve put all of our focus in trying to correct them, whether this year we will manage to do so and it will be enough to be as competitive as we would like to be, this is yet to be seen,” Sainz reiterated.
“But I am definitely feeling like we managed to identify our weaknesses well last year; we managed to develop well through the year, so hopefully that good work and understanding is going to translate and carry forward to this year’s car.
“That’s what everyone hopes, and obviously me included, but we still need to check it on track.
“And even if it’s not as much as we would like and we still have some things to improve I am hoping that the direction and the leadership will still be in a positive way.”
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