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Out-going Ferrari driver Carlos Sainz has said his team “simply didn’t execute” in the Las Vegas Grand Prix despite him claiming third place behind the two Mercedes drivers – Sainz having engaged in some heated team radio discussions with his race engineer following a bizarre pit lane incident.
Starting P2 on Saturday evening at the Las Vegas Strip Circuit, by Lap 26 of 50 Sainz had dropped to third behind eventual race winner George Russell and Max Verstappen (who won his fourth title in Las Vegas after ultimately coming home P5).
READ MORE: Verstappen crowned champion as Russell heads Mercedes 1-2 in Las Vegas
At this point in the race, Sainz was urging Ferrari to stop him for a second time, as the Ferraris of Sainz and team mate Charles Leclerc came under pressure from the Mercedes of Lewis Hamilton – who would eventually finish P2.
After letting Leclerc by on Lap 27, however, Sainz was then instructed to pit – only to be told at the last minute to stay out by his engineer, forcing him to skip over the pit entry apron and back onto the track.
“What happened?!” demanded Sainz, before engineer Riccardo Adami replied: “We were not ready.”
“Wake up guys, come on!” shouted Sainz in response.
Asked about the incident post-race, Sainz said: “We just simply didn’t execute in general. We just didn’t execute a very good race.
“I think we stayed out one lap too late on mediums, two laps too late on hards and by the time I was going to pit, we had this messy radio communication in the pit entry, which probably made me lose that lap that I was completely grained and I had to let past Charles, plus the two or three seconds that I lost in pit entry. That means a lot of race time that meant that maybe we could have ended up fighting Lewis.
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“But it just shows that in this sport, you need to do things perfectly weekend in, weekend out. We’ve been doing things really well in strategy and on race management all year around but today wasn’t our day. We just didn’t do things well and we will have to learn from it and make sure we come back in Qatar stronger.”
One positive for Sainz and Ferrari was that, with his and Leclerc’s P3 and P4 to Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri’s P6 and P7 in Las Vegas, the Scuderia gained 12 points on constructors’ leaders McLaren, the gap now 24 points between the teams with two races to go in Qatar and Abu Dhabi.
Asked how he saw the remaining two races playing out, Sainz replied: “We just need to go into them trying to maximise whatever we have. I think over the last few weekends, we’ve done a good job.
READ MORE: ‘A very special and beautiful season’ – Verstappen ‘proud’ after joining elites as a four-time F1 champion in Las Vegas
“I think… yesterday the maximum was a P2 in quali, today the maximum was a P3 in the race. In Qatar, the maximum might be a P5 or a P6, because with this car in a track like Qatar, I expect to struggle, and I expect McLaren and Mercedes to be very strong, probably even Red Bull given that they were strong also in quali in Austin.
“So I think it’s going to be a very challenging weekend for us; that’s why today it was important for us to get maximum number of points available and we kind of did that for the pace that we had.
“I think the Mercedes was just the quicker car, the quicker package. I think George and Lewis drove a very good race, at the same time that us, we just struggled too much with graining, more than what we were anticipating.
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“That meant we couldn’t push on the tyres, we were having to save so much that we couldn’t use the pace of the car, and we were just simply not fast enough. Not our day.”
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