The man from Madrid put in an amazing performance that almost hit a jackpot… if it weren’t for the Williams driver, who didn’t follow the overlapping rule
When David Coulthard, a former McLaren and Red Bull driver, picked up Carlos Sainz to interview him as soon as he finished second, the man from Madrid was serious. He had just matched last year’s result by saving the furniture for Ferrari (who re-released the Stratego with Leclerc) and also reducing the pressure on him. He had fought with Sergio Perez for the win and, although he had not achieved it, he made it clear that he is a candidate if the conditions are right.
“We did everything we had to do, we were patient with the wet tires and then we switched to the dry tires… but staying behind a lapped car cost me the win. You can understand the frustration because a good lap out of the pit lane would have given me the win, but sometimes this sport is like that,” he admitted. That tendency to which Sainz refers is a classic in this kind of situation, Nicholas Latifi.
The progression is perfectly visible in the ‘onboard’ video of Sainz’s Ferrari. The man from Madrid comes out of the pits, the Canadian Williams is on the track, with a lost lap, and overtakes him. Instead of being left behind, as the numerous blue flags (up to seven stewards allowed them) forced him to show it, Latifi returns it to him for the tunnel after Sainz was forced into the foul zone (and, in this case, nat) off the track, giving him an attempted spin. As Pérez won by a narrow margin of 2.3 seconds and Sainz arrived with the tires in much better condition, it can be said that this incident with Latifi could have perfectly cost him the win.
It is yet another problem Sainz faces when he opts for victory. While things ended well for others, and without taking any of the credit for the Mexican’s Numantine defence, Pérez took advantage of a rider who had been singled out several times for his ineffectiveness. Lewis Hamilton fans won’t even forgive him for the mishap he had on the penultimate lap of the Abu Dhabi GP in 2021, when he caused a stoppage in the race and ultimately benefited Max Verstappen. Runners like Latifi, Stroll or Tsunoda (the Japanese are the least experienced and have the greatest potential for improvement) are considered almost dangerous to the rest of the runners.
In addition to this incident, Sainz made it clear that he can still pull the chestnuts out of Ferrari’s fire. After the monumental gaffe they committed on the pit wall with Leclerc, who had a win in his hand that would have been both emotional and pure sporting gold, the Spaniard took the team on his back.
He even dared to contradict the orders he received on the radio and risked mounting dry tires without going through the trance of the rainy breaks first. Riccardo Adami, his engineer, accepted this decision. The personality Sainz shows in every race cannot be faulted, both when he has the day and when he doesn’t.
After seven contested flights, Carlos Sainz is fifth in the overall standings, trailed by one point this year by the champion of regularity, a George Russell who continues to count the top prizes finished by ‘top 5’. It’s not the desired result, but the two consecutive outs Sainz already has in his locker is a burden that is difficult to lift.
The next appointment, without being a 100% city circuit, can also give you a good return. The GP of Azerbaijan, in Baku, is presented as a place where mistakes are paid with abandonment (that narrow area next to the 13th century castle) may be the place of Sainz’s ‘well yes’, but he has to be careful and feel good He is now in a game with no jokers, and Ferrari, beginning to relapse into his inbred schizophrenia, will need his composure and ‘pace’. Sainz knows: making plans just means committing to a calendar that can fail purely because of statistics. Or would the Spanish GP not be the ideal place?
Source: La Verdad
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