Scuderia Ferrari Spanish driver Carlos Sainz feels that the lower temperatures and track conditions at the Hungaroring racetrack in Mogyorod, near Budapest, were the main factors that affected the race pace of the Ferrari F1-75 cars on Sunday, in the last F1 event until the summer break.
Carlos Sainz and his Maranello teammate Charles Leclerc started from P2 and P3, spending the first part of the Hungarian Grand Prix chasing the Mercedes car of George Russell, who started from pole position and kept the lead for the first part of the race. The Moneagsque driver was even able to overtake the British driver on track, but unfortunately after the second round of pit stops, both Ferrari drivers lost a lot of ground, albeit due to different reasons.
Charles Leclerc was in the lead and eventually finished in sixth place after Scuderia Ferrari decided to cover Red Bull’s pit stop with Max Verstappen: but the set of new hard tyres was far from ideal, and led to significant lap time loss for Charles, while Carlos Sainz continued on the medium tyres and ended the race with the softs, but simply lost pace and drifted lower to finish outside the podium.
The Spaniard pointed to Sunday’s cool temperatures as a the main reason for the F1-75 car’s loss of performance as compared to the data seen during the first two free practice sessions on Friday:
“We clearly struggled as a team today. [I’m] a bit puzzled, because we expected to have very good race pace coming from Friday, but it’s clear that with these lower temperatures and track condition changes that we had today there was something going on with the car and the tyres that we just were not fast. Something to analyse – a day to probably look back, regroup, see what we did wrong for these kinds of conditions, and come back after the summer break with a better package. The first I think cost me the overcut on George []Russell], which obviously would have simplified the race from there onwards, because then you don’t have dirty air. I could have, I think, done an overcut with a fast pit-stop, but it is what it is. We’ve been decent on pit-stops all year, but now and then a couple of pit-stops are failing us, and we need to analyse what we can do better. We want to be stronger in the second half.” – Carlos Sainz explained after the Hungarian Grand Prix on Sunday.
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While the Italian side’s strategy call to mount the hard tyre on the F1-75 car of Charles Leclerc was debated at length after the Hungaroring race, Carlos Sainz, who ran a medium-medium-soft strategy, did not know taking into consideration the circumstances how the Maranello team could have better managed its tyre choices.
“I don’t know what we would have done better on strategy, but I can tell you that when the pace is bad like it was today, strategy is always difficult, because you don’t have pace with any compound. I guess the pit-stop cost me today twice, because from probably leading the race, I went to P3 and having to manage the tyres a lot, which was a shame, but do you include that as a strategy? I don’t know. I think today we were just slow, and if you compare our pace against Red Bull on Friday, to our pace against Red Bull today, there was clearly something in the car and in the tyres that we were just not doing right.” – the Ferrari driver concluded.
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