Carlos Sainz: “It’s easier to get the strategy right when you have a good car”

Spanish driver Carlos Sainz (Ferrari) has assured that the team is experiencing “a very good moment”, with the victory of the Monegasque Charles Leclerc this Sunday in the Italian Grand Prix, after “difficult races”, and has insisted that it is “easier to get the strategy right when you have a good car”. “We have taken risks with the team, we have not gone to one stop with the two cars and it has worked, which is the important thing. We have managed to win the race in front of all the tifosi and with Charles. It is a very good moment for the team because we came from difficult races, we came with a new package, which has surely helped us win here,” he said in statements to DAZN. However, he acknowledged that it was “late” to see that we could go to a single stop. “Until lap 30 it wasn’t clear what could be done. Obviously I thought that by extending the tyre to lap 20 and the others to laps 14-15 I was the only one who had a chance of making a stop. Even the guy who stopped on lap 15 won the race. There was a moment of crisis with our tyres around lap 35, where it seemed like it was going to be impossible to make it to the end. The funny thing is that the tyre recovered and we managed to do it,” he said. “For my part, the first stint went quite well. I thought that by extending the medium tyre to lap 20, as I did, I would be the only one to make a stop. Then it was shown that even by stopping on lap 15, as Charles did, you could make a stop and he made it work. I lost those six, seven seconds of race time by extending the medium, which may have cost me a bit of time, but the important thing is that we won, and we have to celebrate that.” He also spoke about the Scuderia’s good strategy and tyre management. “They were Achilles’ heels caused by the fact that we didn’t have a good car on Sunday. Now we have a good car on Sunday and the strategies seem better. I never tire of repeating it, but it’s much easier to get the strategy right when you have a good car than when you don’t,” he said. The driver from Madrid also expressed his satisfaction at having made the Australian Oscar Piastri (McLaren) lose time so that he couldn’t finally overtake Leclerc. “That was the objective. He finished two seconds behind Charles, and I hope to have made him lose at least those two seconds on that lap that I did slowly in front of him,” he stressed. Finally, Sainz assured that now there will be “two circuits where we might repeat the victory.” “They are two circuits that are very different from the rest of the year, more similar to Monza, Singapore, Baku… They are circuits where the Ferrari can do well. We will have to wait until Austin to really see how much we have improved,” he concluded.