I have 17 races to fight for future - Sainz

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Carlos Sainz believes he has the rest of the season to fight to prove he is worthy of a seat at Red Bull.

Red Bull opted to replace Daniil Kvyat with Max Verstappen ahead of this weekend's Spanish Grand Prix, with Sainz overlooked in favour of his former Toro Rosso team-mate. Sat alongside Kvyat and Verstappen in the FIA press conference in Barcelona, Sainz says he isn't focusing on the reasons Red Bull didn't promote him but the fact he still has a chance to prove himself.

“Well I don’t get to evaluate the performance of each driver, obviously that is done by my bosses at Red Bull," Sainz said. "But it’s now my time.

"I appreciate what Red Bull is doing quite a lot which is just to put young talent in to a Formula 1 team as soon as you do a good job. They show you the confidence, they give you the chance and now it is my time to fight more than ever for that.

"I have 17 races ahead to get the maximum out of myself, to fight for my chance as much as I can and I’m sure that if I show the same speed but just with better results then my chance can come.”

With Verstappen's race engineer Xevi Pujolar also leaving Toro Rosso recently, Sainz dismissed Helmut Marko's suggestion that the relationship between the drivers also led to the change in line-up.

“I think the personal relationship Max and I have is not a big issue, honestly. I think we both always maintained the respect outside of the track and I think we showed it in every moment. I think it’s more a matter of the team perspective, of how the team was working and that’s where Franz Tost and Helmut Marko come to play and take the decision. But from Max and myself there was always respect, there was always good vibes with each other.

"Obviously we were fighting a lot on track, we were always very, very close to each other and there was always some battles going on but they stayed on the track and out there it was just a matter of engineering, maybe just not being a comfortable team and that’s why they decided to take these decisions internally.

“We were just talking before coming in [to the press conference] that we were going to go go-karting in one week together. So that shows that it really stays on track.”

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.