There was a time where the likes of Sebastian Vettel, Fernando Alonso, Lewis Hamilton, and Kimi Raikkonen were the most famous drivers on the grid. This was true until the 2018 season, the last where the famous grid saw a combination of 11 world championships (by which time Lewis had only 4 titles).
And now, with Fernando Alonso already an ex-F1 driver with Vettel on his way out or as it seems for the 2021 season, it may not be wrong to say that the strongest four on the grid are Hamilton, Leclerc, Ricciardo, and Verstappen.
Though, there’s also a younger lot comprising the famous Spaniard Carlos Sainz Jr., a leader of a pack (of sorts) comprising avid young talents such as his McLaren teammate Lando Norris, Esteban Ocon, George Russell, and Alexander Albon that make for other prominent names on the grid.
And truth be told, given how massive and simply unprecedented have been the recent spate of developments in Formula 1, it’s only a matter of time before Carlos Sainz Jr. rises to become a hot-shot material; quite possibly a man we may see reach the front of the grid on more occasions that he usually does.
So when days back, it was confirmed that Ferrari had signed in the young 25-year-old driver for the 2021 season, in some ways, it only increased the prominence and equity of the driver currently signed for McLaren.
And believe it or not, it’s this sense of innate confidence that’s auguring well in case of the Madrid-born driver, one whose one of the most talked about men on the current grid.
That being said, does Carlos Sainz Jr. have a plan for the 2020 F1 season, a season that we all are desperately waiting for, a season that’s yet to begin for the word resumption is not even applicable?
Well, guess what!
The young confident driver who has against his name a best-place finish of P3 at the 2019 Brazilian Grand Prix ( a drive none can forget) has shared a bold plan for when the season finally goes underway.
And this concerns his driving style, rather to put it succinctly, what he can extract from his 2020 McLaren!
In a recent interaction, when asked about how long might it take him to get the best running out of his 2020 machine, here’s what the Ferrari-bound driver (for 2021) had to say:
I think it will take a few laps to feel exactly 100%, but not many,” he said. “To find the proper limit of a Formula 1 car?”
That’s not all! He would go onto elaborate about what might be required to do so from his current McLaren-Renault machine and shared, “Maybe FP1, you go out with a hard set of tyres, you do push, cool, push, cool, push, then all of a sudden you put a new set on and go quicker and you say: ‘oh, now I start to feel the G-forces and the braking points’ and I get my head around a Formula 1 car again.”
That said, there’s always something refreshing about a young driver being so utterly confident about his skills- isn’t it? And to say the truth, an in-form Carlos Sainz Jr. also spices up things on the grid, given some of his famous contemporaries, albeit ones in powerful machines, happen to be Leclerc and Verstappen, the latter, who might be in his plans to forge a successful rivalry with in the years to come.