Carlos Sainz thinks he would be a good teammate for Red Bull’s Max Verstappen.
The Spaniard is being replaced at Ferrari next year by Lewis Hamilton, with only teams like Williams, Audi-owned Sauber and Alpine making clear moves to snap him up for 2025 and beyond.
Sainz’s father, rally legend Carlos Sainz snr, has a strong relationship with Audi and its owner Volkswagen. "He told me a thousand times how good they would be," Sainz, 30, told Auto Motor und Sport.
"He is 100 percent sure that Audi will be strong in the future. I wanted to help build something, but I also wanted good results in the short term, and in my opinion Williams was the best option.
"But it was not an easy decision," said Sainz. "Up until the day I signed, there were several good options. In the end, I had to follow my instincts.
"Time will tell if I was right."
Sainz would clearly have preferred to switch to another top team, and there were rumours a return to the Red Bull family - having debuted for Toro Rosso in 2015 - could be on the cards.
Dr Helmut Marko, however, said many months ago that he feared a reunion of the Sainz-Max Verstappen pairing would have been too explosive.
Sainz rejects that theory.
"If my relationship with Max is the reason I didn’t end up there, then I say there wouldn’t have been any problems," he insists. "If the decision depended on that alone, then it would just be wrong.
"But I’ve already told them that. I think I would get on well with Max. We were 16 and 19 at the time and have matured a lot since then. At Toro Rosso, they put you in a team and say ’fight each other, then whoever is best gets to go to Red Bull’.
"You’re not working together for the championship, otherwise the behaviour of the two drivers would change completely. You can see it with Charles (Leclerc) and Lando (Norris), my last two teammates. There were never any problems."
There is no doubt, however, that Verstappen is a highly dominant force not only at Red Bull Racing, but also in Formula 1 more generally.
The Dutchman’s personality is also much more aggressive and brash. On a live sim-racing stream in the hours after F1’s announcement of its 2025 season launch at London’s O2 arena, for instance, Verstappen boldly declared: "I hope I’m sick that week."
Sainz, though, thinks a lot of a driver’s image in F1 is "external".
"Inside, a driver can look very different," he said. "As a driver, you always play around with how you are viewed from the outside.
"I don’t mean to say that Max isn’t like he is. Lando has decided to reveal a bit more about himself. I don’t know if I’m somewhere in between or more in one direction, but - as I said - you should be careful with such analyses."