F1 | Sainz stopped by gearbox: “It will be a sort of Sprint weekend for me”

Carlos Sainz couldn’t have had much to say at the end of the first day of testing for the Formula 1 Dutch Grand Prix. After announcing that his future will be with Williams, the Spanish driver had said that he would finally be able to approach race weekends in a more relaxed manner, but the weather and his Ferrari played a nasty trick on him.

The morning session was affected by rain and a rather strong wind, which meant that everyone did very little lap time. Then the sun came out on Zandvoort and the second free practice session was held on a dry track. But the son of art was unable to take advantage of it, because the gearbox of his SF-24 left him stranded after just 7 laps.

A mishap that relegated him to the bottom of the standings, but above all prevented him from gathering information for the rest of the weekend. Wanting to see the glass half full, at least this failure will not cost him a penalty, so it will not impose a further handicap on him in addition to the precious time lost.

“I basically didn’t run today. I only did three laps in FP1 because of the weather, but that’s something that affected everyone. In the second session we had a gearbox issue that meant we lost the session completely, doing just 2-3 flying laps,” Sainz said.

“It will be a sort of Sprint weekend for me, because I will have only one session to try to recover the lost ground and to do well. Tomorrow morning I will have to start strong in Free Practice 3 to make sure I can immediately find the pace, hoping to then put in some good performances”, he added.

The problem is that today seemed to be a particularly complicated day for Ferrari, because even his teammate Charles Leclerc was unable to do better than the ninth time, with a gap of over seven tenths. After all, the Dutch track was on paper one of the most complicated tracks for the Reds.

“It was not an ideal situation, we needed to be on track with both cars, because we knew this was one of the most complicated tracks for us, probably because of the very long and very fast corners. It would have been better to try some things with two cars, but tomorrow morning we will do our best to make up for lost time”, concluded Carlos.