Carlos Sainz says he hopes that after some fine-tuning Ferrari will be fighting for the win once again this weekend in Austria.
The season is heating up as more and more teams settle into their new machinery and are fighting for those all-important points ahead of the summer break.
The Ferrari driver secured his first win in Formula 1 after an epic battle at the British Grand Prix at Silverstone on Sunday and is hungry for more success with the Maranello-based team, he says.
At lights out on race day, things ground to a halt before the end of Lap One due to a horror crash that saw Zhou Guanyu hurtling towards the barriers on his halo before his Alfa Romeo flipped over the tyre barrier and became trapped between it and the fence.
When racing resumed – 45 minutes later – there was an epic battle to the finish that saw the Spaniard clinch the win, ahead of Red Bull’s Sergio Perez in second and Mercedes man, Lewis Hamilton in third.
Perez and Hamilton were faced with a gritty fight to the finish with Leclerc and Alonso driving their hearts out in the final laps but the Red Bull and Mercedes ultimately came out on top to secure the final two steps on the podium.
Speaking during a post-race press conference, Sainz said there were moments when he struggled across the weekend, but after a stellar performance on race day, he’s hoping to bring that same energy to the Red Bull Ring for yet another victory.
“We’ve been going through some better weekends recently and my feeling has been a lot better,” he said.
“This weekend, I was very quick in FP2 and I felt like I had the pace to win a race this weekend. But for some reason in the race I struggled… Already in FP3 I struggled a lot more. And in the race, again, I struggled.
“If anything, I feel like this weekend we might have gone a bit into another extreme of the set-up to try and make me too comfortable with it.
“And then maybe today I was lacking a bit of front end, but I hope that for Austria we can fine tune it and maybe we can actually fight for that win again and do some good pole positions in the dry and win it in the dry again.”
