(Motorsport) It’s hard to imagine that Scuderia Ferrari, who were considered to be title challengers in both the Drivers and Constructors Standings, are now fighting for second place with Mercedes, who haven’t won a single race this season. It’s clear for all to see that Ferrari’s performance has dropped significantly in recent months and both Sainz and Leclerc finished fifth and sixth at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez at the Mexican Grand Prix. What will be a big concern is that the drivers were a minute behind Max Verstappen and didn’t even look like challenging Lewis Hamilton or George Russell during the race.

In the post race on Sunday, Leclerc said “The thing that hurts is that I feel we've maximised everything (on race day) and even though we've done that, we are one minute away from Max, a huge difference. We need to look into that and make our bad days better, mostly because whenever we have a bad day on Sunday it seems to be a really bad day." Carlos Sainz said that he knew some ‘compromises’ would be made as the race was being held in different conditions compared to other tracks on the calendar. The Spaniard said “With the altitude we knew we were going to lose quite a bit of performance. More than what we expected and we were just off the pace But, I haven't done a race in a month, so to get back into it and have a full race, pace management, complete the race and learn from the car, I take that as a positive." 

It was back in July at the Austrian Grand Prix when Ferrari won their last race and have been playing second fiddle to Red Bull ever since. While the Italian team generally do well in qualifying, reliability issues combined with strategy blunders have been persistent this season, resulting in Mercedes catching up to them. Ferrari are now just 50 points ahead of Mercedes in the Constructors Standings with two races to go, and as things stand, the momentum lies with the Silver Arrows and it wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility for the team to make up the deficit in Brazil and Abu Dhabi and seal second place.

Also read: Max Verstappen secures 14th win of the season at the Mexico GP