Scuderia Ferrari driver Carlos Sainz pinpoints the need for the Maranello team to improve their pit stops, after yet another slow tyre change led to losing the possibility of a better finish in the last round of the 2021 Formula 1 season, the United States Grand Prix at Circuit of the Americas.
Carlos Sainz, who also suffered a slow stop at the previous round in Turkey, attempted to undercut Daniel Ricciardo in the fight for fifth place in Austin, but the 5.6s pit stop made it impossible for the Spanish driver to recover the time lost in the pits in just one lap, as McLaren reacted and immediately made their tyre change:
“The pit stop [was] unfortunate, again,” Carlos Sainz admitted – “We need to keep looking at it and we need to keep improving as a team because we are not happy with the situation. It’s been a few pit stops now that we have we have been struggling with. On my side, I think it’s the second consecutive and the third all season. So it’s quite a lot of points there that we are leaving on the table with these small problems.” – he explained.
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Carlos Sainz confirmed that it “would have been fairly easy with the undercut there on Ricciardo” without his slow stop. “But it is what it is. We need to keep working as a team to improve it. We need to keep digging at it because there are points there that maybe this year are not so important, but if we want to be fighting for championships in the future, this is the kind of things that we need to be becoming excellent at and that we are maybe still lacking a bit.”
Scuderia Ferrari Team principal Mattia Binotto said the Italian side is looking into the cause of the slow tyre change. “We know something was wrong on the rear right-hand side,” he said. “We had some difficulties to remove the tyre from the car. As simple as that. Now why that happened is something we’ll go through with all the analysis. But that is what happened.” – he concluded.
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