“There’s a little black magic”

Carlos Sainz He went from dreaming of pole position before the weekend to losing everything in an instant. The weekend didn’t start well, with brake problems holding him back throughout Friday. And on Saturday, the two Ferraris, who should have been contenders for pole and victory, were washed away by the impossibility of predicting how the tire would perform on each lap.

This problem is something repeated, not only in the red car, but in this case, it punished the Ferrari team on a day where, in addition, Carlos made a mistake that cost him dearly: he hit the wall in Q3 and will start 10th in Singapore, far from proving last year’s victory.

“I don’t know what will happen to the car. Now it will come and the mechanics will check if something needs to be changed and penalized or not. The truth is that this was a very rare incident, an accident that I really did not expect and has never happened to me in my career,” Carlos Sainz explained before the microphone of ‘DAZN’.

“It’s a combination of things.: very cold tires, two cars had to pass, I had to go to the dirt side to pass them, and at the beginning of the lap I was slow to come to the last corner and I would lose one or two tenths for sure at the start coming back and trying to -recover them, with the cold tire and the slipstream in front of Piastri… well, the car is gone,” he added.

“It’s a shame, a shame, a mistake you don’t want to make, but that’s racing and tomorrow we’ll try to come back,” He added before going into the issue of Pirelli’s tire inconsistency, something Leclerc also complained about, without understanding what happened to the temperature of his tires.

What about the wheels?

“What is clear is that this weekend we had a lot of tire heating problems. Yesterday I had problems with the brakes, today every lap the tire behaves differently for some reason that I still don’t fully understand in this sport, this year I can’t put the tire in the temperature range if where I was able to put it last year, and eventually you’re going to run into problems.”commented Carlos.

“And yes, it’s clear that it’s very sensitive on the exit lap as well. “I don’t know, there is a little black magic that we need to understand, because it is clear that this year we are very sensitive to the tires in qualifying.”he added.

“It’s a strange thing, to be honest. It’s something I can’t relate to anything because I don’t know. What I do know is that every lap is different, every lap in Turn 1 you have a different balance and tire behavior and it’s a little bit trying to predict what might happen, and when you start to have traffic on the exit lap, when you start you have traffic in the last sector, then it becomes a bit of a lottery. But it’s the same for everyone and the weekend is worth it to us,” he insisted.