Sainz on Ferrari: 'Everything started happening very quickly!'
Carlos Sainz is busy gearing up for his race debut with Ferrari at Bahrain in March, but a year ago such a quantum leap in his career seemed almost unthinkable.
“The first time we got in contact, you can imagine, you go into it without trying to believe it too much,” he told Motorsport.com.
"[You assume] they must just be talking to all the drivers, so I tried to be very relaxed about it.
“But during the lockdown there was nothing to do," he recalled. "There was not a lot to think about, so I started to get a bit more interested and a bit more keen.
“All of a sudden, everything started happening very quickly during that period of time!"
Just two days after the shock pre-season announcement from Ferrarti that it wasn't going to re-sign Sebastian Vettel for 2021 came confirmation that Sainz had won the coveted seat at Maranello.
“When you sign for Ferrari, you know what’s coming, all the media attention,” Sainz noted. “It’s a period of time that you know you’re going to get a lot of media attention, especially in Spain.
"I don’t think many people in Spain expected Carlos Sainz to be part of Ferrari maybe one or two years ago. So it got quite big at the time."
Sainz said he had done his best to play down the attention and focus on the job in hand at McLaren.
"It very quickly went away. We managed together with McLaren to make sure there were not a lot of stories developing, just focusing on the present," he said. "We wanted to focus on a very important year that we had. I think it worked really well."
So well in fact that Sainz secured sixth place in the drivers standings, and McLaren finished in third position in the constructors championship. That's considerably ahead of Ferrari who were a mere sixth.
That's led to suggestions that Sainz might regret his early decision to move to Ferrari, but the driver dismissed such talk.
"Becoming a Ferrari driver is in every driver's mind and every driver's dreams," he told select media including Crash.net. "Independently of the situation, it's very, very difficult to say no to that.
"I'd always felt comfortable with Toro Rosso, and I always felt like Ferrari could be a good place for me," he added. "I know Italian, I know some people there, and I felt like I could have a successful time there immediately.
"Apart from that I think sentimentally driving for the most successful team in the history of the sport is always the dream of any Formula 1 driver.”
"I wouldn't move to a team if I didn't have a good feeling about it, that's for sure," he insisted. "They've clearly developed the car and they are in a much better place now than they were six, seven months ago.
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