Carlos Sainz was on the verge of his first victory in Formula 1, and only Sergio Pérez prevented the Madrid native from lifting the winner’s trophy after an intelligent strategy that gave him the second final place.
The Spaniard made the most of his options, but the clock played against him and he ran out of time to attack the Mexican on more occasions. At the end of the test, Sainz was disappointed not to finish on top this Sunday in Monaco , but ended up satisfied with tasting the champagne for the second time in a row in these streets.
Asked how crazy the race was with the delayed start and red flag caused by Mick Schumacher, the Ferrari man explained: “It was crazy, but I think we did everything we had to do.”
“We were patient on the wet tyres, we made the right decision to switch to the dry and a terrible lap out behind a car that had fallen behind cost me the win,” admitted Sainz. “You can understand the frustration, because a clean start lap would have secured me the race win today, but that’s the way this sport is sometimes.”
The Spaniard hit the nail on the head with his strategy of switching to the hard dry tyre, and although he didn’t get the victory, he overtook his teammate Charles Leclerc and Max Verstappen: “I knew it from the middle of the first stint, I started to see the dry line and I realized I was going to go straight to the slicks.”
“I think we made the right decision as we were leading the race,” Sainz argued. “So we pitted to put on the hard tire and obviously this rubber is never easy on the out lap but I had to do 12 or more corners behind the lapped car which lost me at least a couple of seconds. that cost me the victory of the race”.
“Anyway, I’m not going to complain too much. I know that this sport is like that, Checo [Pérez] had bad luck in Jeddah, today he had a great race, and he was also lucky, in this sport one day there will be back,” said the Spaniard.
Sainz tried to overtake Pérez in the final moments, but it was impossible for him despite the Red Bull’s degradation: “You can see that I also had a lot of graining , especially on the rear wheels, which made the entrance to the tunnel difficult. quite difficult to approach and pass”.
“I was about to try it in the tunnel, but the inside was a bit wet. Checo was braking quite late, so I think if he had braked later I would have taken him ahead”, sentenced the second classified of the day in Monaco.
