Ferrari used Carlos Sainz as a pawn for Leclerc to overtake Norris in Portimao

Ferrari’s head of strategy showed his face after Carlos Sainz was left out of the points zone at Portimao due to a poor choice of tires. To this must be added that the Madrilenian stopped too fast, which caused his tires to be badly damaged at the end of the race. However, the Italian team wanted Lando Norris to react to Carlos Sainz’s movement to try to get Leclerc to overtake the British, as Iñaki Rueda has recognized. “At the start of the race, Carlos was soft and Charles, in the middle. After the Safety Car we found two cars behind Norris, and we wanted to make the race as difficult as possible for McLaren. The best way to do that is to go two different ways. The first car, Carlos’s, stopped earlier because we thought it was enough to go all the way and we tried the undercut on Norris. It wasn’t satisfactory, but we forced Lando to stop one lap later; He did not choose, we chose for him. That gave us the opportunity that if Norris suffered with the tires at the end of the race, Charles would be there with the hard ones, “said Ferrari’s chief strategy officer.” With Carlos we suffered a lot, although we would have wanted to stop soon anyway. With perspective, we would have stopped Carlos but we would ride the hard rubber; and we would have kept Charles longer also with the hard one ”, Iñaki Rueda continued. “When we put the middle wheel on him on lap 20, we thought he could go all the way. But there was graining and that’s why Carlos suffered so much in the second stint ”, he concluded. Sainz knew that the strategy was not correct After finishing eleventh in the Portuguese Grand Prix, the Spaniard pointed out:”We knew that the possibility of ‘graining’ was high and when we put the medium tire, I knew it was not going to last long and that we were going to go backwards.” “We put on the medium tire to try to undercut Norris. We have pushed a lot the first laps, and from there, we opened the ‘graining’ and we went backwards. It has not been a good day, everything has gone quite wrong, so let’s learn from it “, added Carlos Sainz. The man from Madrid recognized that seeing what he suffered in Portimao he would have opted for a different strategy:” Of course now we would do something different, but with the data we had then we thought that a soft-medium strategy would be good, which it was not. It is clear that the hard tire was a stronger tire, in addition we in particular suffered a lot with the medium, the combination of the wheel and our car did not work well. ”“ I am a very competitive person and it was in my hands to finish in the top five if we had a good race. When you finish eleventh with no points, it’s hard to stick with a good thing. I guess when I digest it in the next few hours, it will be easier to extract good things from this grand prize. The sensations with the car, the rhythm throughout the weekend until the graining. But you know me, you know how angry these kinds of situations make me. I will analyze it cold, “he concluded. Carlos Sainz will have it difficult with Leclerc Days later, in an Estrella Galicia event prior to the Spanish Grand Prix, Carlos Sainz was more self-critical:” I did not have the best safety car highlight and I am critical , although I must also learn to manage batteries in such situations ”. On the other hand, the Madrilenian admitted that it will be difficult for him to overcome Leclerc this season:“With Charles, words are unnecessary. We know how fast he is and it will be very, very difficult to get ahead of him on any circuit. We will have to keep trying to improve. ”“ I don’t know the tricks of the Ferrari and the style of the car very well, so I’m doing extra hours in telemetry and data analysis with my engineers, I want to understand how to extract the maximum potential of the car. The fact that I have done it in Portimao does not mean that I will do it in all races, I am still one step behind where I would like to be ”, he concluded.