F1 | Sainz: “The fight with Charles at the start cost us a lot”

It is the first Sunday without a podium in 2024 for Carlos Sainz. It is true that the Spaniard was already missing on the one in Jeddah, but in that case the Ferrari driver was in a hospital bed because he had just undergone emergency surgery for an attack of appendicitis. In the other three outings, however, there had been a sensational victory in Melbourne and two third places in Sakhir and Suzuka.

In Shanghai, however, the Spaniard was never involved. Seventh position on the grid was certainly a handicap in itself, but at the first corner his teammate Charles Leclerc took him to the outside, allowing George Russell's Mercedes to take the inside and overtake both.

The son of art then also lost a position on Nico Hulkenberg's Haas, seeing his race immediately get uphill. And Carlos underlined this in the usual interviews, at the end of a weekend in which he had already had other moments of tension between the two, when they had slightly touched each other in the final stages of yesterday's Sprint.

“It was a bit of a crazy race, what we did at the start cost me and Charles one or two positions and this cost us a lot in the race. Then we tried to follow Russell's Mercedes: I tried to overtake him but he stopped and then we stopped. We put on the hard tires very early and in the last stint I had to go very long, but we still managed to hold on for fifth place, which I think was the best we could do. today,” Sainz told DAZN.

As it stands, the fifth place finish, achieved also thanks to a one-stop strategy, can in a certain sense be seen as the glass half full, but it is undeniable that the pace of the SF-24 this weekend was not lived up to what he had shown previously.

“Honestly, I think we weren't very fast this weekend, when you qualify sixth and seventh there's not much pace in the car. In the race we expected to do better, but that wasn't the case, so it's clear that this is the circuit where we suffered the most. We need to check whether we have done everything possible with the set-up and, if not, it's time to work on the car because this type of circuit hasn't gone well for us.”

The one-stop strategy was effectively forced by a very long Safety Car, which occurred a few laps after Sainz had made his pit stop. At that point he couldn't do anything but manage the pace until the end. “I wanted to do two, for sure, but the Safety Car lasted so long that I had to switch to one, but I had to use very used tires for the whole race, so I just concentrated on getting to the end and having Russell with new tires I couldn't pass, and we managed to do it.”

Finally, when asked to take stock of his season so far, he concluded: “You have to consider that I missed one race (in Saudi Arabia, due to the appendicitis operation) and I still finished in the top five in all Grands Prix, so we started well, but China has been the most difficult circuit so far for both me and Ferrari.”