Sainz hoping Renault can close the gap to Haas

Carlos Sainz Jr (ESP) Renault Sport F1 Team RS18.

Renault driver Carlos Sainz has admitted that Haas F1 appears to have gained an advantage over their mid-field rivals heading into this weekend's Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne.

Sainz was ninth fastest in Friday's first practice session, but slipped to 11th in the afternoon's times. By comparison, Romain Grosjean finished the day in the top six for Haas.

“Unfortunately they look to be that half a step in front of the rest of the midfield,” Sainz admitted after the end of practice.

“Hopefully we can recover that soon.

"They have been quick through all of pre-season testing," he pointed out. "We have kept an eye on them because we saw they were really, really fast straight away."

However, Sainz felt that it was still too soon to have an accurate picture of teams' relative standings.

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"The midfield is extremely tight so it’s difficult to say where we’ll be tomorrow," he said.

"We do need to work on getting the ultrasoft working a bit better as we didn’t manage a clean lap with it today," he continued. "My ultrasoft run could have been a lot better without a couple of issues that I had.

"My soft run pace on the first run was really good and I was seventh at that point," he explained. "When I put the ultrasoft tyres on I had too many problems on that lap

"I feel confident that tomorrow with a clean lap on the ultrasofts I can move up the order," Sainz insisted.

The weather could also play a part. After today's perfect late-summer conditions, Saturday is expected to be wet.

"Conditions were great on track, it was an ideal day for Melbourne," agreed Sainz. "But I think tomorrow we might have more of a challenge."

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.