Carlos Sainz did his best to save the weekend at the Dutch GP, where Ferrari was not up to the task. The Madrid driver suffered from day one at Zandvoort: he started by giving his seat in Free Training 1 to driver Aacademy Robert Shwartzman and later had to deal with a car that was still hard to drive and more on high-load tracks like the Dutch track. Despite the added challenges, Sainz managed to finish third and defended fifth place tooth and nail against Hamilton’s abuses. He is not satisfied with the balance yet and is already considering the Italian Grand Prix.
“The race was very tough, we were constantly struggling with cars that were going much faster than us. We’ve been in the fight, we’ve never made a mistake We were largely successful in the strategy that helped us fight for fifth place. “I don’t think there is much that we can aim for this weekend,” Carlos said.
“Hopefully we’ll be good again at Monza next week. I think it was a weekend to limit damage, it’s clear that we had a lot of trouble with the car in the race and in qualifying. Learn from that. We were too slow… How come the Alps, the McLarens, it’s all on us? going that fast?… I’m sure we’ll be back at our place in Monza”, he said. Sainz.
Sainz had a particularly difficult time in the last few laps of the race as his tires were on the limit and Hamilton was on the alert:First of all, the last episode was hard. I was out of spacers, I had to put in used ones from qualifying, they were too open due to some dry laps I did with them yesterday and the steering didn’t give me any grip so we didn’t go. I was fast and had to rely on Hamilton. It was true that things did not go badly at the beginning of the race with the new inter.”
The Madrid driver, who rose to fifth place in the Drivers’ World Championship ahead of his teammate Leclerc, who left today, regretted not being able to fight for third place after Alonso’s slow stance. The Spaniard returned to the track after Carlos but launched a devastating attack: “I only had one second on the podium. Unfortunately… The podium didn’t have the rhythm today, there was no place to catch it, look, I tried. But no, we regressed more, we were going slower, we did enough today by being on the podium at one point”, settled down and resigned.