MADRID, 24 Ago. (EUROPA PRESS) –
Spanish driver Carlos Sainz (Ferrari) has described himself as “optimistic” for the Dutch Grand Prix, the fifteenth round of the Formula 1 World Championship, and has predicted that his team will play “the card of moving forward” in Sunday’s race, despite starting from eleventh position on the grid.
“We’ll have to see. I’m optimistic that we’ll be able to play the card of moving forward in the race, but on a circuit where it’s always difficult to overtake,” Sainz said in statements collected by DAZN from the Zandvoort Circuit, where the Madrid driver did not advance to Q3.
“I don’t think you saw much of me because I didn’t touch the track until qualifying,” he told a journalist. “In this sport, there are no miracles. You miss the second free practice session, which was the only dry one and I only managed to do two laps. Obviously, arriving at qualifying without having touched the soft tyre and without having touched the dry tyres, you try to give everything to get through to Q3,” Sainz summed up in the press conference.
“The traffic with Hulkenberg certainly didn’t help. The car this weekend wasn’t exactly a very easy and fast car either, so as soon as those details fail, you’re out,” lamented Sainz, after referring to the German driver from the Haas team.
On the other hand, he played down the importance of having briefly led the timesheets at the start of the qualifying sessions. “At that point, obviously, everyone only did one lap on the soft tyre, I had done three or four to try to make up time, so I had already been on track longer than the others,” said the Madrid-born driver.
“As soon as everyone put on two or three soft tyres, that’s where we noticed where we failed, which was in putting them both together and getting into the rhythm. So yes, it’s not ideal, but it is what it is. We’ll have to learn that, if we want to fight for the championship, we can’t fail in details like yesterday’s because they end up costing us the weekend,” concluded Sainz from Zandvoort.