Carlos Sainz urges Jeddah marshals to stay sharp amid potential high-speed accidents. Carlos urges Jeddah F1 marshals to “stay sharp” amid accident risks.

Scuderia Ferrari Spanish driver Carlos Sainz has cautioned that track officials in Saudi Arabia will have to “stay sharp” taking into consideration the potential for high-speed accidents on the new Jeddah Formula 1 track this weekend.

The high average speeds and sequences of flat out and blind corners on the track, which is hosting Saudi Arabia first Formula One event, means that drivers will have little warning if there’s an accident ahead.

With the circuit’s characteristics in mind, Carlos Sainz explains drivers will have to rely on track marshals and race control to react quickly to incidents.

When asked by Autosport during the Thursday press conference ahead of practice if he had any concerns about the track, Carlos Sainz said:

“Obviously, as a driver, you try not to think too much about this. You try not to focus on these kind of things, and rely fully on the FIA standards, that they normally pretty accurate and pretty good.

“The only thing that as drivers we’ve talked about is that if there’s a crash in front of you, three seconds in front of you, we are doing above 250km/h in every corner, and there’s not going to be time for us to react because there’s a wall in between the crash and ourselves, we cannot see through walls. This is maybe the only big point to raise with the FIA, just to stay sharp with yellow flags and safety cars, red flags, because, it’s gonna be an interesting one.” – the Ferrari driver explained.

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Safety concerns aside, Carlos Sainz feels the nature of Jeddah as a positive move for Formula 1.

“I think as a baseline F1 should have normal racetracks where they are fast tracks full of high speed corners where you can extract everything out of a F1 car – still be safe to do so – but not gain an advantage by going out of the track. That is what happens in modern Formula 1 tracks nowadays. I think we as drivers were pretty clear this is what we want. This looks like an experiment of high speed circuit plus walls that we will need to see how it goes. It looks like the racing could be actually good fun. I just hope that everything obviously safe and that we don’t have any surprises.” – the Ferrari driver concluded.