May 9 (GMM) Carlos Sainz says he is disappointed with the speed of modern formula one.
The Spanish rookie is the reigning champion of Formula Renault 3.5, and he said after practising in his Toro Rosso on Friday: “I’ve driven faster cars here.
“It’s not so nice in the cockpit when you’re going so slowly,” Sainz told Auto Motor und Sport in Barcelona.
Indeed, Sainz’s best time in the afternoon was 1.28.6, which was just six tenths quicker than Stoffel Vandoorne’s pole lap for the ‘junior’ series GP2.
Vandoorne is therefore quicker than the Saubers, Force Indias and Manors.
Pirelli is being pointed at for some of the blame, with Pastor Maldonado saying: “The harder tyres are probably a little too hard.”
Also underwhelmed is the Ferrari-backed junior Raffaele Marciello, who was just half a second quicker in the Sauber on Friday than he then qualified for his GP2 team Trident.
“The power and torque of the (F1) power unit is bigger,” he is quoted by La Gazzetta dello Sport, “but for the rest it is not so different from GP2.
“We (GP2) are only a couple of seconds slower — even the braking points are almost the same,” Marciello added.
However, in the FIA press conference on Friday, most of the team representatives present warned against changing the F1 regulations too radically for 2017.
“Formula one is in the early phase of a major regulation era,” said Mercedes’ Paddy Lowe. “So I think we’ve got a period now where we will stretch out relative to some of those other formulae.”