Carlos Sainz rages after Ferrari breakdown in Australia

“It was simply a disaster,” says Ferrari driver Carlos Sainz about qualifying for the Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne. Because he is only ninth on the starting grid for the third round of the 2022 Formula 1 season, but his Ferrari colleague Charles Leclerc is on pole position.

So what went wrong for Sainz at the crucial moment? Several things, as he says himself. Above all, he had “a lot of bad luck”, emphasizes the Spaniard. Tenor: “Everything that could go wrong in Q3 went wrong.”

First there was the red phase that followed the crash of Alpine driver Fernando Alonso. Sainz was already at the end of his flying lap when the interruption was triggered and was already back on the home stretch, only a few meters away. But because the traffic lights had turned red beforehand, his lap didn’t count.

Sainz emphasized that it was a “good lap”. “Unfortunately we succeeded [aufgrund der Rotphase aber] not getting a safety round on the clock.”

The car doesn’t start in Q3

This took revenge a little later in the continuation of qualifying, when Sainz got in the way of technical problems: the starter didn’t play along. “We couldn’t start the car and drove out three minutes later than planned,” said Sainz.

What sounds like a trifle had major consequences for the Ferrari driver. Sainz: “That’s why I wasn’t able to warm up the tires properly, because everything had to be done quickly. In the end, I basically had to complete my lap on ice-cold tires.”

Just one warm-up lap isn’t enough in Melbourne, Sainz explains, even on the C5 compound that’s not enough. “We need two laps to get the tires to work. I didn’t have the two laps, so my lap on cold tires was modest,” he says.

Sainz: Without a chance on the last try

How little grip did he have on his final attempt? Sainz: “I almost flew off twice. And that’s not how you get a lap done. So my situation proves: If you don’t have the appropriate preparation, the calculation doesn’t add up.”

Or to put it in numbers: While Leclerc drove 1:17.868 minutes in the Ferrari sister car and was almost three tenths ahead of the competition, Sainz was only 1:19.408 minutes and 1.5 seconds behind. That only resulted in P9 because Alonso was rated P10 without a lap time.

It’s annoying for Sainz either way, “especially since I was fighting for pole position throughout the entire qualification,” he says. In fact, he had finished fourth in Q1 and second in Q2. And in Q3 he also seemed poised for a top result.

Sainz also blames Ferrari

Instead, however, Sainz pushes a lot of frustration and lets his Ferrari team boss Mattia Binotto feel it through the press: “Mattia knows that I’m angry, because we shouldn’t have such problems with the starter. And he also knows: Today I’m busy fought for pole position until everything went wrong. I can’t be happy about that.”

Due to the circumstances, he has to digest the qualifying defeat first, says Sainz: “Now I need some sleep. And until I’m in bed, I’m angry. You can probably imagine how it’s bubbling inside me right now. That I guess I don’t have to describe it separately because I shouldn’t have been on P9, but at least on the front row, with a chance of winning the race on Sunday.”

What is still possible from ninth place on the grid in the race

Coming from P9, the chances of success are completely different, despite a strong car. He can therefore only “remain aggressive and try to get forward,” said Sainz.

“However, the midfield is closer together this weekend and we don’t have as much performance advantage as we did in Bahrain. So it will be difficult to make up positions. Also because the fourth DRS zone has been removed. Overtaking should be really difficult again now become,” explains the Ferrari driver and says: “For me it’s the worst possible scenario.”

All of this is made even more difficult by massive bouncing on the back straight. Sainz really shakes it there in every lap, and there is no remedy in sight: “We are in the process of solving this problem. But we would have to make too many compromises with the car in order not to have bouncing, and we don’t want that. As So drivers you have to deal with it, even if it’s not ideal – and very unpredictable.”

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