Carlos Sainz says Ferrari’s decision to have him race on the soft tyre in Saturday’s sprint in Austin was dictated by the Scuderia’s hard data and not the result of a aggressive gamble.
As the only driver to line up on the grid with Pirelli’s red-walled rubber, Sainz quickly realized that he would likely be facing an uphill struggle in the 19-lap mad dash.
But all things considered, the Spaniard acquitted himself well, initially moving up from sixth to fourth before falling back to P6 where he would end his race, just ahead of the Mercedes of George Russell.
“Being the only one on softs doesn’t give you a lot of confidence,” Sainz admitted.
“We thought there were going to be more cars out there with softs and then obviously mid-race once Lando and Perez passed me and George was attacking me, I thought we were just going to go backwards.
“I managed to recover the tyre well and did some good defending in order to keep him [Russell] behind and we brought home a P6 that at one point it didn’t look like it was going to be possible.”
While an outlier in the race given his tyre choice, Sainz insisted that Ferrari’s decision to run the soft compound was suggested by its tyre modelling data. He admitted however that the strategy wasn’t worth the risk.
“First of all, if we go for softs it means that our tyre model suggests that it’s not a bad tyre to go,” he explained. “If not, we simply wouldn’t even consider it.
“It suggested that it could be a decent tyre for this race as in previous years the soft has been a decent tyre here.
©Ferrari
“This time around, clearly we need to analyse if we can do something because was it worth the risk? Maybe it wasn’t.
“But we need to analyse how we can maybe do a bit better there. In the end it paid off at the start, but at one point it did look like it was going to be very tricky.”
Sainz felt that the stratagem had at least yielded some useful information for his team compared to teammate Charles Leclerc’s run on the medium tyre.
“We learned some valuable information for my team,” Sainz said. “Tomorrow, there’s plenty of strategies available out there and now that we know how the soft behaves we can map it and compare it to the medium.”
Sainz will start his US Grand Prix on Sunday from fourth on the grid, while Leclerc will launch his race from pole.
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