The F1 weekend at Zandvoort did not look bright for Ferrari after qualifying. Carlos Sainz had a forgettable Saturday, as the driver born in Madrid was eliminated in Q2 after not managing to get inside the top 10, and was set to start Sunday’s race from P11 on the grid.
However, the Spaniard started escalating places on the grid order even before the race began, being promoted to P10 after Alex Albon’s Williams was disqualified from the Qualifying session.
And so when the lights went out, the #55 Ferrari rocketed quickly through the grid, as he overtook Lance Stroll at the start of the race, and then lately caught up on Fernando Alonso, and Pierre Gasly later in lap 8, sitting P7 before the driver leading the pack crossed the line to race lap 10.
Starting on mediums and betting for a two-stop strategy, Sainz took advantage of his hard compound tyres to overtake Pérez on lap 47, aiming at Russell’s Mercedes as his next objective. However, as the Brit was caught on track, the team from Brackley called him in for his two-stop strategy, and Sainz claimed his final P5 in the Dutch GP, scoring 10 valuable points for the Maranello team.
The Spaniard debriefed his performance afterwards, explaining how the car came alive on high fuel. He only finished 4.8s behind Oscar Piastri at the end.
“Honestly yesterday after qualy I was a bit pessimistic and a bit overwhelmed by the way the weekend had been going, but today straight away I felt like the car in high fuel was feeling quite a bit better than yesterday in low fuel, and that we could do something a bit better than what our predictions were — that was to finish P7, P8.
“Very quickly I managed to pass the midfield, found myself in a very good spot with the tyres and the pace and we started the second stint attacking Perez and Russell to actually in the end pass them and only finish 6-7 seconds away from the podium starting P10, so I think it was a really good performance.
“Clearly today we managed to keep the tyres alive and we managed to push them in the race pretty hard while the others seemed to be struggling a bit more with the management.
“Honestly, to even be able to pass a Red Bull in a tough track like this, it just shows that the car must have been in a sweet spot, and I was driving really well. So yeah, very proud of that.”
Despite his positive conclusions on the SF-24 after the race in Zandvoort, Sainz says they need more downforce and to strike a better balance between qualifying and race pace.
“Yeah absolutely, there’s still a few things to look at qualifying wise, even overall downforce.
“But there’s a trend this year that is the opposite trend to last year where we used to qualify well and race poorly. We’re actually in the opposite spectrum of things, so there’s definitely something to look into there and yeah, hopefully also we are going towards circuits that should suit our car a bit better than this one and hopefully this allows us to be back fighting for podiums.
“Hopefully with this new floor or new upgrades that we will bring soon, these problems [like porpoising] go away, and we can just focus in adding downforce to the car.”
As Lando Norris claimed his second win by a dominant margin in the MCL38 to Verstappen’s second place, the Spaniard gave his opinion on the pace McLaren has stormed back into Formula 1 after the summer break.
“Yes but the gap it’s depressing for all, not only for Ferrari, also Red Bull and Mercedes.
“We actually caught up with McLaren (Piastri) during the race. Lando I think must have done a really solid weekend and it’s also tough to get a prize for that, because yeah, Oscar is P4.
“So it’s not like only McLaren was in a different league, I think Lando must have done a very solid weekend.”
Finally, Sainz concluded with his expectations for next week’s Monza race on Ferrari’s home soil. He started on pole last year, finishing a strong P3 following a wild battle with teammate Charles Leclerc.
“It was very good last year and yeah hopefully it’s been resurfaced, so we will find a very different Monza to the last few years.
“I think we need to wait and see but I hope that Monza is one of those weekends where we can get both cars in the podium or in the top five, and whether we can fight for the win or not, we will see,” he concluded.
