Carlos Sainz says Ferrari’s weaknesses came to the fore in the Spanish Grand Prix as he was unable to push to fight with the Mercedes and Red Bull drivers.
The Spaniard started his home race from second on the grid and attacked Max Verstappen into Turn 1 but then faded as the race progressed, losing out to both Mercedes cars and then Sergio Perez late on. After his encouraging qualifying, Sainz says he knew what Ferrari’s limitations were going to be and he had to focus solely on looking after his tires.
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“I knew he was on a medium tire so maybe I had a bit more grip but he defended well, ran me wide and did what he had to do,” Verstappen said. “I could have taken the escape road, decided to stay legal in a way, let’s say. I had to go for it.
“Honestly I just spent the whole race managing tires because we know we are very hard on them. With this high deg circuit I just couldn’t push, we know it’s a weakness of our car and coming to a high deg circuit, two-stop race we were just managing the whole way, trying to make it to the target laps of the stint and still falling short in a few of them.
“So yeah the weaknesses of the car are coming alive at a circuit like this, with the high speed corners and how hard we are on tires. But also shows (in qualifying) we must have done a pretty good lap, I think (the race) was again a bit back to where the car is in race pace. Probably this sort of track is not great for us.”
Despite slipping to fifth in the race, Sainz was less concerned about the struggles he was facing but had his interest caught by Mercedes’ step forward.
“The biggest surprise was how close Mercedes was in this race. Our pace, we finished 45 seconds, it’s more or less where we finished in Miami where we finished in recent races. It’s just suddenly Mercedes has slotted in-between us and Red Bull and probably where Aston should have been, I don’t know what happened to Aston.”
Ferrari had some new parts in Spain that both drivers used during the race, but Sainz says there’s still more work to do to try and get more pace from the updated car.
“Last year we would have made it back to the top four, top five starting from pit lane. This year the field is tighter and it’s more difficult to make your way through. There’s work to do. Analysis to be done on this package. I trust that what we did is the right direction, now we need to start addressing our weaknesses with the bouncing, with the high-speed, and with this new package and direction hopefully we can start bringing performance.”