F1 News: “It’s a shame that Merc are so quick”

In what was arguably the most eventful race of the 2022 season, Carlos Sainz managed to make quite an impressive recovery to secure his ninth podium finish of the year at the Brazilian Grand Prix this afternoon.

The Spaniard secured a P2 in the sprint race on Saturday but started the main race in P7 behind his teammate, Charles Leclerc, after taking a 5-place grid penalty for taking on a new engine. After several safety car restarts, Sainz managed to recover to P3 to finish the race behind the two Mercedes cars that absolutely dominated the session with their unmatched pace.

In a post-race media interaction, Carlos Sainz admitted that while it could be considered a good race, given that he extracted the maximum potential of his car, Mercedes’ shockingly dominant pace was an issue for the Ferrari drivers. Hey said:

“I think overall it was a good race. We did have some problems there at the start with the brakes on fire. It meant we had to commit to a three-stop which maybe wasn’t the fastest given the degradation. From there I pushed back out to try and catch Checo. I think we can be happy with that. It is a shame that Merc are so quick but congratulations to George.”

Carlos Sainz hoping to regain consistency in 2023

Carlos Sainz seems to be on quite the upward trend ever since he joined McLaren back in 2019 and moved to Ferrari two years later. This season, however, he has not been able to keep up with the pace and consistency of his teammate, something that Sainz hopes to change soon.

In a press conference ahead of the F1 Brazilian GP, ​​the Ferrari driver shared his early struggles with the 2022 challenger and further emphasized the role of multiple DNFs that cost him a decent result at the end of the season. Hey said:

“Yeah, it’s been a challenging one, as you guys have seen from the outside. There was a challenging first third of the season where I struggled a bit with the car balance with the driving style, a car that for some reason didn’t suit me straight out of the box and I had to fight through it quite a lot.And the second two-thirds I have been a lot happier with the car.I’ve been a lot more on the pace, but unfortunately, a lot of DNFs, a lot of reliability issues along the way.”

He added:

“But I’ve learned a lot. I’m proud of the progress I’ve done inside the car, with my engineers, the way that we managed to turn my pace around. And yeah, I’ll make sure next year we are back to being the consistent Carlos of 2021 and get good results.”

Carlos Sainz had one of the finest seasons of his career so far in 2021 and even managed to finish the year ahead of his teammate Charles Leclerc to secure P5 in the world drivers’ championship.

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