Carlos Sainz and Charles Leclerc give their verdicts on a disappointing outing in Mexico
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Ferrari drivers Carlos Sainz(on the left) and Charles Leclerc(on the right)
On pace over the weekend, this was likely Ferrari’s worst race of the season. Carlos Sainz and Charles Leclerc have started on pole position a combined 12 times this season, but this weekend, the most they could manage in qualifying P5 and P7, and during the race, Leclerc went one better. But that was it.
Leclerc in particular had suffered from quite a few issues in qualifying, but even without those, they couldn’t do much in the race. On the other hand, Mercedes finished 2-4, and Lewis Hamilton might even have given Max Verstappen a run for his money, if the tyre choices were different. Both Ferrari drivers agree on one thing – the altitude did not suit their car, at all.
As per RacingNews365, Sainz explained to the media: “We knew going into the weekend, with this car, with this altitude, we knew we were going to lose quite a bit of performance.” It’s quite curious in fact, as the Silver Arrows likely had the best qualifying session of the season, while Ferrari had their worst. So the track suits the Mercedes, but the Maranello team were left fighting for scraps.
But Sainz was happy with one thing – that he at least completed the race, after two retirements in a row: “We were one minute away [from Verstappen], but I haven’t done a race in a month [after retirements in Japan and the United States], so it was nice to actually do it and have a good race with the pace management.”
Charles Leclerc thinks they ‘maximized’ the race
It was an important weekend for the P2 battle, and Sergio Perez came out on top in Mexico. This means the Mexican now holds a lead of 5 points over Charles Leclerc, who slots back into P3. It’s still touch-and-go, however, and the Monegasque still has a chance to take back second place. He feels and hopes that Mexico was a one-off bad performance.
“Today, I felt like an explanation was that it was a bit of a one-off here to the different conditions and I hope we can come back to our usual performance in Brazil. I feel like we’ve maximised absolutely everything today and, even though we’ve done that, we are still one minute away from Max, which is a huge difference.”
He concluded by saying: “So, we need to look into making our bad days better, because whenever we have a bad day, especially on a Sunday, it is a really bad day.”
Indeed, the pace was quite bad, as he finished almost 47 seconds behind Sergio Perez as well, who rounded up the final podium place. The last two races are really a testing ground for them. At least it was a fairly clean weekend, but unfortunately, the pace just wasn’t there for them.
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Aniket Tripathi
(1002 Articles Published)