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Carlos Sainz Jr is set to make his Ferrari Formula 1 debut testing an older car to augment his learning process ahead of a reduced pre-season programme.
F1’s pre-season testing in 2021 is expected to be held over just three days, putting drivers switching teams or entering F1 at a disadvantage compared to previous years.
Sainz is swapping from McLaren to Ferrari and said on Thursday in Bahrain that one and a half days “in these complex cars is not enough to prepare for a Formula 1 season”.
“You don’t get to know the tricks of the car, the steering wheel, even though you do a lot of simulator work,” said Sainz.
“To get to know the crew, one day and a half is very, very little and probably not enough.
“We will have to adapt, and we will need to find a way to make sure we are as prepared as possible within the limits of one day and a half.”
F1’s rules only permit testing of current cars in officially organised sessions but two-year-old cars can be driven privately, which Sainz said “could be an option”.
On Friday, team principal Mattia Binotto confirmed Ferrari is trying to organise that.
“We are planning to organise something for Carlos to make sure that he can speed up an easier integration with the teams of engineers, with the car and our way of working, our procedures,” said Binotto.
“The simulator will be important in this respect, obviously in the simulator he may work with his race team, his engineers, technicians.
“But we are currently trying to organise January-time to run with an old car mainly to get used to team and our procedures and know the people.”
McLaren will not be able to run Sainz’s successor Daniel Ricciardo in an old car because it does not have Renault engines to run either its 2018 or 2019 machinery.
“I don’t think it is a big disadvantage in the end,” said McLaren team boss Andreas Seidl.
“We have resources within the team that are limited at some point and we simply need to make decisions of how we will use these resources for the maximum outcome in the end in terms of results.
“We clearly made the decision that the investment into putting something up like this has less priority compared to other things and this is how we ended up at the position.”
Racing Point says it also lacks the ability to arrange such a test for Sebastian Vettel, who will join the team for its transformation to Aston Martin.
Team boss Otmar Szafnauer said: “We too don’t have the ability to run a two-year old car so we’ll be doing everything we can with Seb to get him integrated into the team, do a lot of sim work with him well and use the three days of testing that we have to the best of our ability to get him ready for the first race.”
