Plastic bag stuck on Carlos Sainz's F1-75 car could explain poor pace in last stint of Hungarian GP

Plastic bag stuck on Carlos Sainz’s F1-75 car could explain poor pace in last stint of Hungarian GP. There was a plastic bag stuck on Carlos‘ car.

For Scuderia Ferrari Monegasque driver Charles Leclerc, the 2022 Hungarian Grand Prix at the Hungaroring racetrack in Mogyorod was compromised by a bad strategy call from the Maranello team, who attempted to cover the pit stop of Red Bull’s Max Verstappen and chose to mount the hard tyres on the F1-75 car of Charles, which were far from ideal given the cold temperatures in Budapest on Sunday. Carlos Sainz also missed out on a place on the podium after running in second and third place during the first half of the race, with medium tyres.

With Carlos, the Italian side got the tyre strategy slightly better (although also in his case, the stints on mediums could have been lengthened a bit more given the fact that this was the best tyre at the Hungaroring), but the Spaniard had a poor race pace in the final stint on softs, with graining and high degradation, which did not allow him to recover the gap to George Russell, while at the same time being overtaken by the other Mercedes car of Lewis Hamilton, who was also running in the softs at that stage of the race.

The lack of pace could have been caused by a plastic bag on the side of his Ferrari, as confirmed by Carlos Sainz after the Hungarian Grand Prix: “I just found when I stepped out of the car that there was a plastic sack on the side of the car,” Carlos Sainz said in a post-race interview, while at the same time admitting he did not know how the exact time loss that could have been caused as a result – “I don’t know if it was costing me downforce because it was quite a big.”

For now it is not clear if the bag cost Carlos Sainz any big performance during the event at the Hungaroring racetrack, but he did echo the comments made by Scuderia Ferrari team principal Mattia Binotto, who said their car “was not working as expected”. Speaking to Sky Sports after the Hungarian Grand Prix, Carlos Sainz added, “I don’t know what we could have done better on strategy, but I can tell you that when the pace is bad like it was today, the strategy is always difficult” – he concluded.