Winner at Silverstone last Sunday, Carlos Sainz Jr. arrived in Austria refreshed and ready to confirm himself. He tried it in the Sprint Race at the Red Bull Ring, where in the early stages of the race he battled with an impregnable Max Verstappen first and with his teammate Charles Leclerc then, to “settle” at the end of the third step of the podium.
The Ferrari driver, found after a few subdued weekends, showed himself in great shape already at the first corner, where at the start he tried to undermine the poleman and world leader. Nothing to do though, because Verstappen had a frenzied pace that allowed him to try to escape. This was also successful thanks to the battle waged by Sainz and his teammate. Position swaps that left with bated breath characterized the opening laps. It was then the Monegasque who got the better of overtaking his neighbor in the box in a decisive way and setting the pace.
The man from Madrid could not help but follow Charles trying to keep pace. Mission impossible starting from a certain moment of the race, in which his teammate managed to take a good margin, while Carlos struggled to keep up with him. The Spaniard from Ferrari attributes the difficulty to excessive overheating of the tires which occurred in order to stay too far behind the Monegasque.
Charles Leclerc, Ferrari F1-75, Carlos Sainz, Ferrari F1-75, George Russell, Mercedes W13
Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images
“I got off to a good start”, comments Carlos Sainz at the end of the Sprint Race. “I had a couple of fights at the start, first with Max in Turn 3 and then with Charles again in the same corner but a little further on in the race. That’s okay, it was fun as it should be, racing is like that. Maybe I overheated the tires a little while staying behind Charles, and when I had to lift my foot to recover my race is over ”.
Sainz then focuses on the fight with Leclerc. As we know, the teammate is always the main opponent and the two Red drivers proved it today. This effectively gave Verstappen a solo victory, however, the Madrid driver does not believe that the duel between the two Ferrari drivers could have influenced the final result in any way: “The fight with Charles was good, very funny. I don’t know if this could have influenced the fight with Verstappen, my feeling was that he was very much in control today. We weren’t much faster. What we need to see is how to be able to stay close to Max at the start and at the end of the race tomorrow ”.
Step? “The pace is there, if it is enough to overtake him on the track we will see it tomorrow. Because we have the step to stay behind him and stay close to him. The problem is that to overtake him you have to be faster and you have to do a slightly different strategy. This is where we have a good advantage for tomorrow, because we have two cars we can fight with ”.
Once the first heat has been archived, it’s time to move towards the real race on Sunday. In Austria there is a double chance to fight for the victory and Sainz does not want to let the opportunity pass. Red Bull, however, showed a superior pace and in the Ferrari House we will have to work in view of the long race to get closer: “First of all, there will be a need to improve the pace because Verstappen seemed very strong at the start and at the start of the race. Slowly we began to approach him and to match his pace. Tomorrow the race will be longer, we will have different compounds. Anything can happen, the important thing is that we will both be fighting and we will do our best to try to beat Max ”.
#Sainz #fight #Charles #affect #Max