After a meager Sprint result Carlos Sainz managed to bring home a fourth place on track yesterday during the US Grand Prix. Eventually he would be promoted to third after Lewis Hamilton’s disqualification, but nonetheless he was quite happy after the race, in which he was able to take on the McLarens and Mercedeses.
“Yeah, [I am] very happy. Honestly, if you would have told me yesterday after seeing how much we struggled against the McLarens and the Mercs that today we would be fighting them, yeah, I would have been quite, quite happy.
“Especially because Lando at one point in the first thing he was very far ahead and then we must have done a a good job catching back a good, good, solid pace.
“And I think we’re today, we didn’t invent anything. We just did our race and we were very quick. So I’m quite happy with that.”
On Saturday the Spaniard opted to start on the soft tyre, but the high degradation made for a difficult afternoon, in which he losts quite some pace towards the end of the race, although he wasn’t too displeased looking back at it a day later.
“Well, for me personally, I already yesterday I felt like I did a pretty good job for a soft tyre. So I think in race I’ve been relatively stronger this weekend.”
He wasn’t too pleased about his qualifying however, stating that he needs to improve those.
“Something to look into qualifying because the last couple of races my quali’s haven’t been nothing special,” Sainz explained. “But in the race I’m quick. I was quick in Suzuka, quick here and now I need to focus on getting my quali pace back and keep doing a good job in the race.
“Because the the race pace is definitely solid and today I was pushing hard out there and with good tyre management.”
An improved Mercedes package will make up for an exciting last few races with the battle for second in the constructor’s championship heating up. A battle in which the Ferrari driver thinks his team is on the back foot.
“Given our limitations with this car, how poor is our height and how much we’re bouncing, I expect that our tyre deg and our race pace not to be great this weekend.
“We just suffer a lot with this, not bouncing, but a poor ride that we have in our car and if I would have had a bit more time on not the Sprint weekend, I think we could have made the car definitely a bit quicker and a bit bit better for the race.
“So yeah, even though Merc has done a step and I think it will be very tough to beat them, this end of the season.”
In the first part of the race Sainz dropped back quite a bit, which was due to his own attempt at keeping up with Hamilton and Max Verstappen. He managed to turn that around and get good pace towards the end.
“I think we did a good job. I very early on, because of trying to keep up with Lewis and Max and keeping in their DRS, I destroyed my front tyre in the first sector, trying to keep up on DRS.
“For me it was a clear two stop as soon as I open up that front tyre I was definitely asking for a 2. And yeah, from there onwards, honestly, I do felt like I could push on tyres and I was quite solid out there.
“For me it was because of the how the first string went on, no discussion and on the second stint I could manage the fronts a lot better. And I was a lot quicker.”
Teammate Charles Leclerc seemed a bit confused about the swap between both Ferrari drivers, but accoding to Sainz he would have finished ahead anyway.
“I think I was a lot quicker at that stage. So swap, no swap, I think that we were going to finish ahead anyway. I guess we would lose time with any of the cars and you know, and with Checo coming behind. I think it was always going to be tough.”
With the bumps and the surface being an issue here, affecting both the performance and end result of the race, Sainz thinks Mexico will be easier next weekend.
“There’s just the curbs. Curb riding there. Sector 1, Sector 2 is a lot of curb riding, which we need to get right, but but hopefully we can put the Singapore set up on and and we can be good and let’s see how the engine behaves this this year.”
