Carlos Sainz said he believes Ferrari's return to the top of F1 has made the team and drivers push too hard, which has caused some incidents throughout the 2022 season
Max Verstappen left the Paul Ricard Circuit as the big winner of the 2022 French GP, but the scene that marked the race was undoubtedly the accident suffered by Charles Leclerc while leading. The Ferrari driver lost control of his car at the long corner 11 and drove straight into the wall, giving the lead to his biggest rival in the championship. After the race, Carlos Sainz - his teammate - argued that the way Ferrari has approached racing this year, pushing to the limit, increases the chance that drivers will make mistakes on the track.
"I think because we are in the front this year, we are pushing too hard and we are not easing up at all," Sainz opined. "Mistakes like that can happen because we are really pushing to the maximum and it's crazy the risks we are taking with the way we are accelerating," he stressed.
As an argument, Sainz recalled that he has also made mistakes this season, as in Australia, for example. Moreover, he treated the fact as something normal that all drivers will experience at some point - Leclerc himself had already experienced something similar in Imola. However, the #16 was able to come back for the race in Emilia-Romagna, something that was not possible in Le Castellet.
▶️ Get to know the GRAND PRIME channel on Twitch by clicking here!
"I made a mistake in a race before, Charles [Leclerc] made one here [in France], Max [Verstappen] will make some eventually, so these things happen," he assessed. "It's a tricky curve. We were very fast as a team throughout the weekend on that corner, it's a turn where we were very strong," he revealed.
Finally, Sainz stated that he has been learning from the mistakes he made at the beginning of the year, his first in F1 where he has a car capable of fighting for the title. Despite a rather complicated start to the season, the Spaniard put the mistakes behind him and even took his first win in the category by triumphing at the British GP.
"I think I've made progress," he noted. "I think Charles' mistake just shows that it's not easy to be at the limit of the car all the time, and that probably cost me at the beginning of the year some mistakes that I shouldn't have made," Leclerc's teammate closed.