Carlos Sainz has expressed that Ferrari’s pace late in the Sprint race at Formula 1‘s United States Grand Prix “gives me hope” going into the remainder of the weekend.
Sainz completed several aggressive overtaking moves to slice through the field from fifth place on the grid to seize second place behind race winner Max Verstappen.
The Spaniard was engaged in a battle with team-mate Charles Leclerc in the opening laps which saw the two swap places several times until Sainz won out on Lap 5.
Sainz then profited from Mercedes’ race struggles to overtake George Russell and later capitalised on Lando Norris’ lock-up into Turn 1 to take second on the last lap.
“Yeah, I really enjoyed it, obviously,” Sainz said. “This year we have a car that allows us to move forward in the race.
“Last year it was looking in the mirrors, in the Sprints, in the races, and this year the car tends to come alive in the race.
“And immediately after lap one I saw we had a good pace, and I could keep up with the guys in front, and yeah, we went racing.
“Yeah, it was some exciting battles, first with Charles, I remember at some point thinking, ‘okay, we’re having fun here’.
“Because I was overtaking him on the inside, he was doing the switchback on the inside on the exits, and it was quite fun.
“Then we got George, and towards the end, I thought Lando was going to be tricky to get, but we made it two laps to the end, and on the last lap I could move into Turn 1.”
Ferrari’s late-race encouragement
Sainz reckons Ferrari can take added encouragement into the main race that it remained competitive in the closing laps even despite his earlier squabble with Leclerc.
Asked whether that fight with his team-mate cost the Italian marque the chance to take the race to Verstappen, Sainz responded: “It’s impossible to say.
“We will see tomorrow, I knew that obviously the first few laps I was quite quick, and I wanted to get to the front as soon as possible, and that was the plan.
“We did probably the thing that we suffered the most with, is obviously being in so much battle offline, online, the tyre degradation or the tyre management wasn’t ideal.
“But even without that tyre management towards the end of the race, we were still pretty competitive, so it gives me hope going into tomorrow.”
Sainz targeting stronger qualifying
But while he is confident about Ferrari’s prospects in Austin, Sainz has conceded that ensuring he qualifies in a stronger position will be imperative to his win chances.
“It gives me good hope,” he said regarding Ferrari’s Sprint outing. “I think now we need to focus on qualifying.
“I think qualifying is a very important part of the week, and now our car recently seems to be racing a bit better than qualifying, and now we need to see if we can qualify.
“I think top three gives you a good chance going into Sunday here, as then you can overtake. It’s normally a race with a lot of pit stops, with a lot of overtaking.
“So, yeah, I think at least for here, get ourselves into contention on Sunday. You need to be further ahead from where I was today.”
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