I feel like Sainz is trying to push too much probably the pressure getting to him car that should be challenging and Charles doing better and its costing ferrari money
Yup, sadly. He needs to step back from driving at 105% and getting some solid points on the board for a few races. He'll get there, but realistically any chance of this title has gone. He'd be better of regrouping and getting himself in a better place for next season.
In a Discord server I compared Leclerc vs Sainz to Button vs Barrichello. In 2008 Barrichello comprehensively outclassed Button, but when Honda/Brawn nailed the BGP 001 it was Button who emerged as the comfortable team leader while Barrichello was the one who was making constant mistakes, poor strategy calls and desperate lunges trying to keep up. Sainz's season so far as mirrored that a fair bit.
Barrichello recovered to have a better second half of the season (even beating Button regularly) but by then the damage had already been done and he was let go at the end of the season (Button could have stayed, but thought McLaren the better long term project - oh how wrong he was, though to be fair it was the right move at the time he made it).
It's something Button himself said during FP2, though that was more about Hamilton adapting to driving a poor car better than he did. Still that was a long time ago, and Hamilton has changed his style and approach a lot since then, driving the hybrids like Button drove the much lighter V8s.
Will see where Merc really are when qualifying gets underway hope they are in the mix will be so good to see 3 teams challenging
While their single lap pace looked better, they were still a long way off in the race sims (about 4 tenths per lap down on average) but the running was so fragmented that it was hard to get any real gauge.
The track still has a lot of evolution to come - I mean 3/4 of the way through FP1 one Williams was over 4 seconds off the pace, while the other Williams was in 2nd, half a second off! Plenty can change before Q3 gets underway.
