Carlo Sainz Jr., McLaren F1 dirver, maintained that even though he was able to mark the fastest lap, he still feels that “teams like Ferrari and Red Bull” has still to show what they are capable of.
Lando Norris,who runs also for Williams, was the first one to set the pace on Barcelona’s track for Formula 1 pre-season testing.
But Sainz exploited the MCL34 capacities on track with the fastest lap of 1m 17.144s in the second week of testing.
Sainz performance outscore Nico Hulkenberg’s opening week bench mark. He was able to go quarter of a second faster than Hulkenberg. And the lap time is also comparable to Lewis Hamilton’s last year pole time at Spanish Grand Prix.
Asked for a comment of his time on that lap, Sainz said: “I think it’s not for me to comment on that, but if you are clever enough to see our kind of running, you would guess that it was a good try.”
Sainz was contended with performance direction, but agreed that McLaren is “still not where we want to be”.
“There’s still big areas of improvement,” he added.
“The important stuff to come out of this seven or eight days [is that] every time I’ve been on track the car has been progressing.
“I think our car balance has gotten better over the last few days, and that is allowing us to extract a bit more from it.
“But still there is a long season ahead where we need to keep working, we’re still not where we want to be.
“This is definitely the right answer, and we need to keep working hard because a [1m]17.1s around Barcelona is fast I guess, but I expect teams like Ferrari and Red Bull can go much lower and much faster than that.
“So I’m very cautious and very calm.”
Sainz also spoke related to the multiple changes that the team has incorporated into MCL34 for better performance.
“Pretty much everything has kind of been improved,” he said.
“There’s still underlying balance issues that we are working on and that we cannot get rid of until we bring upgrades to the car.
“So that’s what Formula 1 is about: decide on what you need to improve, and in the following races try and bring upgrades to make it a bit better.”
