Carlos Sainz Jnr admitted he had concerns about Williams’ strategy when they called him in for his first pit stop during the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix.
He was one of the first drivers to pit, following George Russell in on lap 12. As many other drivers ran significantly further into the race before pitting, it compromised Sainz’s strategy.
His team mate Alexander Albon ran behind him early on but didn’t make his first pit stop until later in the race. That helped him to finish fifth.
Sainz, who came in eighth, believes he could have finished further ahead had he been on the correct strategy.
“Obviously I’m a bit unhappy right now after another weekend where we have good pace,” he told the official F1 channel. He felt his car was “strong enough to score a top five today.”
“We were quicker than Mercedes, quicker than Ferrari,” said Sainz. “I honestly felt really good out there the whole weekend.
“But for some reason we don’t seem to catch a break on Sundays with the race execution. We pitted really early, it felt too early at the time and obviously it was too early in the end.”
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While Albon scored his third fifth place of the season, Sainz is yet to finish higher than eighth. Coming after a misunderstanding over a strategy instruction at the previous race in Miami, Sainz said there is still room for improvement in how he communicates with his new team.
“We just need to keep making steps forward on understanding each other on Sundays because at the moment it’s costing us a lot of points,” he said.
“But if at race [seven] I’m showing the level that I’m showing in terms of speed with the car and the way I feel, I know we can only go forward,” he said. “So I will remain positive and keep pushing each other to keep improving as a team.”
Sainz admitted he would not have expected “a few races ago, even a year ago, that we would be fighting Mercedes and Ferrari on pure pace at these tracks, and I would be upset with a P8.”
“But right now the reality is that we had a car the last two weekends to beat them, and we haven’t. This obviously doesn’t make me very happy because I know we have the potential and the speed to beat these teams at these sort of tracks but we don’t seem to execute well on Sundays.
“So it just means as a team we need to improve, we need to keep making our understanding with each other a bit better to make sure on Sundays we don’t over-complicate things. Today I didn’t expect to have to fight back from P15 to P8, which made my life difficult, but we managed to do it.”
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