Of all the twenty drivers in the current grid for the 2024 world championship season, it is Carlos Sainz jr. who faces nothing shy than a litmus test of sorts.
Quite frankly, the way he performs this season and the grid position he is able to hold onto upon the competition of what is infallibly the most gruelling challenge for drivers out there, will decide the future course of his F1 career.
This is a driver who didn’t waste any time whatsoever to prove his worth in his maiden Scuderia Ferrari assignment; he beat his teammate Charles Leclerc by a margin as scant but definitive at 4.5 points in 2021, which was his first year in red racing overalls.
His then greatest moment in Formula 1 arrived a year later when he beat the likes of Lewis Hamilton at the seven time world champion’s home race at Silverstone to notch up a first, if also memorable, career win.
But most importantly, if you were to rewind the clock back to September of 2023, you’d realise that from that point on until the present day, it’s no one else but Sainz who has emerged with a win when the rest on the grid have quite simply failed to stop the Max Verstappen charge.
It’s one thing to win a race but something quite uniquely spectacular when you emerge as the only non Red Bull driver in a world championship season to win a Formula 1 Grand Prix.
Sainz at Singapore last year was devastating and blindingly fast, just the keywords with which you could possibly find dozens of Leclerc literature online.
But as far as this year is concerned and make no mistake, the season is just two race old (on present day), Sainz is already a busy man truly engrossed in the back spinning and spine tingling adrenaline-pumped action.
It took him just one race, one, to enforce the point, to emerge with Scuderia Ferrari’s maiden podium of the year.
The fighting P3 at the season opener at Sakhir, home to the Bahrain Grand Prix, was firm evidence of Carlos Sainz wanting to exert his weight and draw crowds by sheer worth of performance.
Never a product of hype and not necessarily the object of everyone’s Ferrari affection as that sort of luxury is often afforded to the more popular Leclerc, a best selling material of sorts, Carlos Sainz in 2024 means serious business.
Although it’s often said that one tends to get under tons of pressure when being in the know that it’s your final season at a works Constructor team, if thought otherwise, in another sense, it tends to make things a touch clearer than before.
You simply get to know that all you have is one season to prove them a point and where 2024 is concerned, Sainz has the unquestionable luxury of racing in what is F1’s longest season.
Even as he missed out on the spectacular action-packed Jeddah race owing to an unwanted run in with appendicitis, roars about a comeback for the driver of SF 24#55 have already pumped viewers with great enthusiasm.
Only fair to say that Carlos Sainz himself is raring to go. He must surely be pumped to see the enterprising debut of a driver several years his junior, but one with pomp and self confidence: Ollie Bearman.
And while it’s somewhere fruitless and needless to engage in the discussion as to where might Sainz have finished at Jeddah considering the F1 newbie scored a valiant seventh, surely, there’s merit in suggesting that the Spaniard would have taken some notes on the performance of the 2024 machine that carries a sense of pomp capable of fuelling fans with endless verve of adrenaline.
It was truly heartening to see Ferrari’s most recent race winner resurfacing at the paddock inside 24 hours of undergoing what he called a “smooth operation” at Saudi Arabia.
Cool, calm and congenital- Formula 1’s smooth operator will be dying to make a defiant comeback in his SF24.
But what’ll be most interesting and important at the same time will be to see just how Sainz proceeds this season in comparison to the man often fondly labelled Ferrari’s main driver: Leclerc.
With both drivers accumulating a podium apiece and a machine that seems to have something in it somewhere to match the menacingly quick Red Bull, just how might the future races pan out for Ferrari? And the most dominant headliner in there will be to see whether Carlos Sainz can pull up an ace or two in what lies ahead.
Surely, the Tifosi would love something memorable from the ebb of the sport’s most understated talent.