With the driver market dominated by talks of Ricciardo’s move to Renault and Gasly to Red Bull, Carlos Sainz’s move to McLaren has gone under the radar a little bit.
Sainz has taken the seat left by Fernando Alonso’s retirement, big footsteps to follow, but the Spaniard hopes that he could be helped by having a better car than McLaren did last year.
In a quote that we hope won’t go the same way as Alonso’s “now we can fight” from Australia last year, Sainz believes that McLaren have turned over a new leaf and are ready to compete.
He said at the Autosport show: “I’m quite sure that McLaren has hit a low point [in 2018] and they’re also going to get it better on the chassis so all those things combined. I expect to be in a better position with McLaren and hope and I think we have turned a corner.
“McLaren has a very clear plan which is hopefully in the near future is to go back to what McLaren has always been, which is a winning team. But it is a long term plan – we cannot get overexcited.
“We know we need to work hard, and we know that the team last year was really far away from [winning]. But we have sat down, we have seen together and know what we need to do to become bigger and stronger.”