Carlos Sainz Finished third in Saturday’s qualifying and he’s convinced he has the rhythm to fight for the podium at the Miami Grand Prix this Sunday. But the truth is that the Madrid man failed to break through to fifth place after losing to George Russell.
“We have to keep trying things. “Every weekend we try something, but on Saturday we fight for pole position and then Sunday comes and they slap us in the face in the race.”
“Max and Checo’s car is on another planet and Alonso’s Aston Martin undervalued much better than we did. Second in qualifying and then in the race, Mercedes got us two or three out of ten”, analyzed Carlos.
Sainz started third and pressed Alonso for the podium all the way to the first stop.. The feeling with the midfielders was good, but he took risks with the difficult ones to surprise Asturian and the strategy was not as expected: “I felt very good with the midfielders and they made me think the podium is possible. It is possible to pass Alonso and this is a chance to undercut us. On lap 18 we stopped and after stopping and doing some quick laps with hard laps, this ruined the rest of the race a bit‘, he explained.
“After that we started aging to overheat the tire and that shows you have very little flexibility to apply different strategies in our car.” As soon as we get out of the ideal laps, we have a lot of trouble with hard rubber. We had many inconsistencies, such as overheating of the tires and lack of flexibility,” added Carlos.
“If we had used a slightly more standard strategy, if we had gone longer with the medium, we would have suffered less with the hard but we tried. We took the podium and maybe that cost us fourth place. I did the first stin perfectly and I pushed Alonso, maybe we shot ourselves in the foot and it was a very long rally with a lot of inconsistencies”, concluded the man from Madrid.