Charles Leclerc started seventh in the sprint on Saturday and finished fifth, although he had hoped to do better.
His teammate Carlos Sainz finished eighth after fending off attacks from Daniel Ricciardo, saying he could not attack at full strength to avoid the engine overheating.
Charles Leclerc (5th): “Compared to Mercedes, our race pace was not bad, but over the distance we are inferior to McLaren and Red Bull.
We have to work on our race pace, we are missing something. I don’t quite understand how you can be so close in the qualifying results and so far away in the race.
This is what we are focusing on now, both in the short and long term; it is extremely important.”
Carlos Sainz (8th): “Today we were going to save as many fresh tires as possible for Sunday’s race, so it was clear from the start that we were going to have a difficult day. What we didn’t expect was that we would have to monitor the engine temperature. To prevent its growth, I often had to swerve, which led to a great loss of time.
Will this be a problem during the race? Like I said, we didn’t expect to have to spend so much time on this today. I hope tomorrow will be better – today I couldn’t attack the whole distance. Hopefully I can attack more tomorrow.”
Source: F1 News
I am Christopher Clyde, an experienced journalist and content writer with a passion for sports. I have been writing about Formula 1 news for the past five years and am currently employed as an author at athletistic.com, one of the top sports websites in the US.
