With Leclerc retiring due to a mechanical failure and a Verstappen whose DRS worked only intermittently, Sainz had serious chances of victory, but two failures prevented him from going beyond 4th position even with one last failure from Hamilton.
The home Grand Prix for Carlos Sainz has made him break a statistic, but in the negative sense: with his fourth position at the end of 66 laps, the Spanish Ferrari driver no longer has a podium result in every race in which he has seen the checkered flag in this 2022.
The third place in Miami served to recover his morale a bit after two consecutive zeros, helping his teammate, also on the podium, in another unstoppable victory for a Max Verstappen who is already the leader of the World Cup, but in Barcelona the ghosts have reappeared.
slow exit
Everything started to go wrong already at the start: while Leclerc and Verstappen started showing some reflexes more or less at the same height, Sainz suffered with the clutch and was forced to make a second start that weighed him down greatly, causing Pérez and even Hamilton to overtake him at the first change .
“A pity, it was a bad race from start to finish,” confessed #55 sadly. “Lots of balance issues”, he continued. The man from Madrid risked his neck against the #44 at turn 3, trying to recover lost ground, but the Mercedes driver ended up proclaiming himself the winner of that particular battle.
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«Above all… yes, that gust of wind that he must have caught me entering turn 4, that I have not been able to manage and I have gone to the gravel, “added Sainz, focusing on his second big problem in a race in which he has not been able to enjoy everything he would have liked with his team.
intermittent wind
“From there I have damaged the car a lot on the ground, and was going with very little downforce for the rest of the race. Even so, we tried to come back, at the end 4th, suffering a lot throughout the race, but well… it is what it is, ”said Sainz, who is 5th in the general classification of drivers.
It is true that there are still 16 races left in a championship that finally has not found a substitute for the canceled Russian GP, but Sainz needs more and more urgently to return to his form, which in the past led him to beat his teammate team on his debut with Ferrari.
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“It was a bad race for the team. Too bad for Charles, we don’t know exactly what happened yet, but it’s part of a 23-race championship. There will always be good races, bad races… this has been one of the worst for the team so far this season, but for Monaco we will try to remake ourselves”, he concluded.