Ferrari driver Carlos Sainz is set to lose his job. He has taken three of the team’s last four race wins since 2022, but that has not been enough to keep his place next season because Mercedes’ Lewis Hamilton will move.
As 2023 ended, Sainz and team-mate Charles Leclerc were set to sign new deals with the team. Leclerc signed in late January, but in early February Ferrari revealed they would be poaching Hamilton from Mercedes, with whom he has won six of his seven championships. Sainz would be gone after four years with the team.
“That it was somewhat of a surprise to the whole F1 world is not news,” he said a few weeks later. “Obviously it was for me too. I’m going to start the season as strong as I can, putting all my effort into being fast, straight from the start.”
Frédéric Vasseur, the Ferrari team principal, said telling Sainz he was leaving was “one of the hardest” phone calls he had ever made.
Sainz performed well for Ferrari, but it was Leclerc who finished second to Red Bull’s Max Verstappen in 2022 (Sainz finished fifth), the most recent year the Italian team contested the championship. Leclerc, who is a product of Ferrari’s Driver Academy, has also forged a reputation as one of the fastest drivers in Formula 1. His number of pole positions, where drivers start races in first place, is 23 compared to his five Sainz. Then there was the prestige for Ferrari to sign a driver as successful as Hamilton.
Sainz, however, did exactly as he had vowed. He started the season with third place at the Bahrain Grand Prix behind the dominant Red Bull drivers. But just before the next race in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, he needed emergency appendicitis surgery and missed the race.
However, just two weeks later, Sainz was back in the Ferrari cockpit in Australia. After “many hours in bed recovering” and using a hyperbaric chamber twice a day and an INDIBA machine to try to increase his healing, Sainz was not only able to drive again, but won that race.
“Life is a roller coaster sometimes, but it can be very nice and good for you,” Sainz said after the win.
He finished third again for the Red Bulls next time out in Japan and is close to Leclerc’s points total despite missing a race.
“I think he’s doing an amazing job, especially this year,” Hamilton said of Sainz ahead of the Miami race in early May.
Sainz returned to full fitness in the week before the Miami event. While cycling in the mountains around Monaco, he eventually recorded “numbers that came out as good as before Jeddah”. Sainz can now focus his efforts on finding a new team for 2025.
Sainz has plenty of options because some drivers at other teams have contracts that expire this year. This includes Audi, which takes over the Stake F1 Team Kick Sauber. Audi is where his father, world champion rally driver Carlos Sainz Sr., has been competing in the Dakar Rally since 2022, winning in 2024.
“Everyone knows there is a top driver available on the market: It’s Carlos Sainz,” Stake spokesman Alessandro Alunni Bravi said at the Miami race this month when discussing his team’s list of potential drivers for to fill the remaining position for 2025. .
But with Audi set to be an unproven newcomer, Sainz could prefer to join one of the two established top teams with vacancies next year: Red Bull or Mercedes, as Hamilton’s replacement.
These teams are waiting to see if their preferred options – current driver Sergio Pérez at Red Bull and highly rated junior driver Andrea Kimi Antonelli for Mercedes – live up to expectations. But Sainz is content to wait for “people to decide in many areas”.
“The only assurance I have is from myself, that I want to make the right decision,” he said. “That’s why it’s also taking a little longer and that’s why I want to look at all the options available.”
