Scuderia Ferrari Spanish driver did not manage to match the pace of his Maranello teammate Charles Leclerc from the first lap of the 2021 Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort, and gradually fell back into the pack of pursuing cars. And although he tried everything to stay ahead of Alpine’s Fernando Alonso in the battle for sixth place, the Spanish driver eventually lost out to a DRS move down the start/finish straight on the final lap of the event.
In the post-race interview, Carlos Sainz admitted that there was no clear explanation for why he was so slow and said only an investigation back at Scuderia Ferrari’s factory this week should provide more details on the matter:
“I cannot explain it obviously. The whole race was a bit of a pain for me, and I was just very slow: sliding around, and degrading the tyres. I lost the feeling that I had with the car on Friday on Saturday. And, to be honest, on the laps to the grid, I already noticed something that I was not really happy with, and the balance was quite off. I basically struggled quite a lot the whole day, and it’s something that we are going to look into in the next few days to try to find out exactly what happened.” – he explained.
Carlos Sainz’s Dutch Grand Prix weekend was far from, after the Ferrari driver suffered a crash in the final free practice at Zandvoort and his SF21 car was severly damaged.
While Scuderia Ferrari managed to completely repair the car, the Italian side admitted that it cannot rule out something being a legacy of that incident. Team boss Mattia Binotto explained:
“We don’t know yet what really was the issue, so we will look at everything. We will look at the car, in terms of assembly. We will look at the setup, we will look at the car balance. At the moment we do not have any answer. From the crash, I don’t think that there is any consequence of it, even though Carlos did not have useful track time in the morning to try to understand a bit more the car. I think we cannot exclude a mistake at the moment, so we will look carefully at all the aspects. I am sure we will come out with a conclusion that will make it more comfortable for the next events.” – he added.
Carlos Sainz concluded added: “It might either be one thing or it could be a lot of small things. I prefer not to jump into conclusions, particularly because I don’t know exactly. We simply haven’t had a look at the data, so it’s going to take a few days. I’m sure we will find something and we will come back stronger. It might just be that it was nothing and I need to change a few things. But it is true that it has been very strange and we’re going to work hard on understanding it.”
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