McLaren's Spanish sensation Carlos Sainz has sent out a warning to the rest of the grid by claiming he and the team both have a long way to go before they reach their potential, following consecutive fifth placed finishes at the German and Hungarian Grand Prix.
Sainz has stormed ahead of the rest of the midfield recently following a slow start to the season, scoring strongly in eight of the nine races to open up a 27 point gap on Kimi Raikkonen in eighth place.
However, Sainz, who will celebrate his 25th birthday on raceday in Belgium, believes that neither he nor his McLaren team has reached top performance yet this season.
He told Motorsport.com: “I do start to know it (the car) pretty well. But I still feel like I have a lot more room for improvement and the car has a lot of more room for improvement, myself setting the car up a bit more to my liking.
“We are still trying a lot of things every Friday just to see which direction I like and everything. But it’s a slow process.
“What I mean is a matter of years, you know? The more years you are in a team or in something, you always learn more about the car and learn more about the team, about the people, how to extract more from every individual. I guess it’s like any other work in the world.”