Ferrari's Carlos Sainz scented victory in today's Monaco Grand Prix but ultimately had to settle for second place behind Red Bull rival Sergio Perez. And he blames a lapped car getting in his way for missing out.
Sainz started the rain-hit race from second place alongside his team mate Charles Leclerc, who had secured pole position for his home GP. He inherited the lead when Leclerc pitted to exchange his initial set of extreme wet tyres for intermediates on lap 17.
The Ferrari pit wall then told Sainz to pit on the next lap, but the Spanish driver argued against the strategy and insisted he should stay out longer. By the time he finally did come in on lap 21 it the track was dry enough to jump straight to slicks.
"I knew it [was the right call] from halfway through the first stint," Sainz told the media in parc ferme after the finish. "I started to see the dry line and I started to realise that it was going to go straight into slicks."
Although that put him back out ahead of Leclerc, who had made a second stop at the same time, it wasn't good enough to prevent Perez from taking the lead after Sainz was held up on his out lap by Williams' Nicholas Latifi.
"I felt like we did everything that we had to do out there," he said. "We stayed patient on the wets, we took the right decision to go on to the slick and a terrible out lap there stuck behind a lapped car cost me a race win today.
"Obviously the hard [compound] is never easy on the outlap," he explained. "But I had to do 12 corners or something like that behind the lapped car that cost me at least a couple of seconds."
On-board footage showed Sainz trailing Latifi, who wasn't able to move aside in response to blue flags that were being waved at him from turn 2 (Saint Devote) through to the exit of turn 8 (Portier).
"You can understand the frustration because a clean out lap would have secured me the race win today," he added. "But it's how this sport is sometimes ... It will turn around one day or later.
"I'm not gonna complain too much, I know that this sport is like that," he acknowledged. "Checo was unlucky in Jeddah, today he did a great race plus got lucky with myself and in this sport."
The Red Bull was still in front when the race was red flagged on lap 30 for Mick Schumacher's accident. Sainz took on a new set of hard tyres to finish the race while Perez gambled on mediums more prone to degradation.
Although the Red Bull locked up at the restart and flat-spotted its tyres, contributing to excessive degradation in the closing laps, Perez was able to fend off the pressure from Sainz all the way to the finish.
Sainz did his best to cut the gap to Perez in the closing laps and made some overtaking attempts that nearly ended in contact, before the tyre wear on the Ferrari forced him to settle for second place at the line.
“You can see I have quite a lot of graining myself too, especially at the rear," he said. "[That] made the entry into the tunnel quite difficult to get close and to pass.
“A couple of times I was really close to launching a move into there [Portier], but it was still a bit wet on the inside.
"Checo was braking quite late, so I think if I had braked any later I would have taken him out with me.”
Clinching second place today means that Sainz now has 83 points in the drivers championship, putting him just one point behind Mercedes' George Russell who was fifth in Monaco.
Ferrari are currently 36 points Red Bull in the constructors championship after the first seven races of the 22-race 2022 season.
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