{"id":11804,"date":"2025-07-21T21:49:09","date_gmt":"2025-07-21T21:49:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/11804\/"},"modified":"2025-07-21T21:49:09","modified_gmt":"2025-07-21T21:49:09","slug":"carlos-sainz-completely-shocked-after-learning-ferrari-axe-from-friend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/11804\/","title":{"rendered":"Carlos Sainz \u201ccompletely shocked\u201d after learning Ferrari axe from friend"},"content":{"rendered":"

Carlos Sainz<\/a> has discussed his reaction to the phone call he received in January of 2024 confirming that he was to be replaced by Lewis Hamilton<\/a> at Ferrari<\/a>. Admitting that it left him “completely shocked”, the driver is now settling into his new place in Williams<\/a> with team-mate\u00a0Alex Albon<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Speaking on the\u00a0High Performance<\/a>\u00a0podcast, the Spaniard opened up about the moment he was told he wasn’t going to continue his career with the Scuderia alongside Charles Leclerc<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“I think it was around end of January or February,” he said. “I was in the middle of my training preparation for the 2024 season. I was hopeful that the Ferrari was going to be a competitive car and I had done everything in December and January obviously to prepare myself for that season.<\/p>\n

“Contract negotiations with Ferrari were a bit stalled in a weird way because we were talking since October to renew my contract and they kept postponing the point of signing and the point of coming to an agreement,” he admitted.<\/p>\n

\"Carlos <\/p>\n

Carlos Sainz, Scuderia Ferrari<\/p>\n

Photo by: Andy Hone \/ Motorsport Images<\/p>\n

His trust in the team and its team principal Fred Vasseur stood strong, but it wasn’t to be for the driver, who would later replace Franco Colapinto at the Grove outfit.<\/p>\n

“I never felt suspicious, I always felt like they were just busy with something else and I never felt like it was not going to happen because every feedback I was getting was, ‘we’re gonna continue for sure, this was just gonna take a couple of hours to agree to the economics side of things and the two or three things we need to agree on, on your future contract, but it’s going to be an easy contract and we will do it very quickly.’<\/p>\n

“I went into the winter with that mentality of: it will get sorted before race one of the 2024 season.<\/p>\n

“And suddenly in the middle of January, end of January, I receive a phone call and they suddenly tell me the news. I heard from a friend that called me, and I was completely shocked.<\/p>\n

“I went from believing I was going to be in Ferrari for a while, still more, to suddenly now I’m out of Ferrari. Lewis is replacing me. What am I going to do now?”<\/p>\n

The hard news saw Sainz continue to fight for his place in the championship, finishing fifth in the drivers’ standings, 66 points behind his team-mate, who finished third.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“It never occurred to me that that could happen. It was a bit shocking. It took me a good week to accept it and to assimilate it.<\/p>\n

“You never get too much of a reaction from me, I think I\u2019m quite level-headed in that sense, but that gave me a bit of a kick\u2026 and I think it made me a better athlete, a better driver. What came out of me in March, April, May was probably the best version of myself as a racing driver to date.”<\/p>\n

In this article<\/p>\n

Be the first to know and subscribe for real-time news email updates on these topics<\/p>\n

Subscribe to news alerts<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Carlos Sainz has discussed his reaction to the phone call he received in January of 2024 confirming that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11805,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[573],"tags":[64,63,4971,817,826,813,816,1510,85,1511,819],"class_list":{"0":"post-11804","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-formula-1","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-carlos-sainz","11":"tag-f1","12":"tag-ferrari","13":"tag-formula-1","14":"tag-formula1","15":"tag-nosyndicate","16":"tag-sports","17":"tag-trendingteam","18":"tag-williams"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11804","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11804"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11804\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11805"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11804"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11804"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11804"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}