Yahoo Autos Carlos Sainz Jr. Made It Here All by Himself
In Formula 1, every serious 2022 championship contender but one is either a former champion poached by another elite team or a homegrown talent developed from the ground up by a major program to eventually win a title. That one exception is Carlos Sainz Jr.
This is the sixteenth installment of our driver-by-driver preview of the 2022 Formula 1 season. This weekend, we will be covering McLaren. You can find the rest of our previews here.
Sainz took destiny into his own hands in 2017, leaving Red Bull's Scuderia Toro Rosso junior team in the middle of a season to join Renault's F1 program early in an attempt to rewrite his fate before Red Bull cast him off to find a new prospect. Then he left Renault for McLaren, then McLaren for Ferrari. In one season in Rosso Corsa, he's beaten a homegrown star in the standings and proven that he deserves a shot to fight for a championship.
HOW HE GOT HERE
Until his decision to leave Red Bull's junior program, the Carlos Sainz Jr. story looks eerily familiar to a half-dozen other stories just like it throughout the past fifteen years. Sainz, the son of rallying legend Carlos Sainz Sr., raced in a variety of lower-level car series with Red Bull backing until he won the 2014 Formula Renault 3.5 Series in 2014. That led to a 2015 F1 call-up at Toro Rosso, which lasted two and a half seasons before it became clear that Red Bull had no real interest in promoting him to the senior team. Whether or not staying with Toro Rosso the next year was an option, he knew he would have to leave the team to move up the grid.
That led him to a contract with Renault for 2018, but the team decided to move quickly and hire him for the remainder of 2017 for the final four races of the season. Sainz left Renault after just one full season for McLaren, where he started in 2019. Two years of outperforming Lando Norris got him a call from Ferrari, where he replaced Sebastian Vettel last year.
HOW 2021 WENT
Despite being teamed with Ferrari's most recent race-winner in Charles Leclerc, Sainz led the team. He scored all four of the program's 2021 podiums on the way to fifth in the championship, his career-best finish and one spot ahead of his result the last two years at McLaren.
