Sainz pleased to capitalise on Toro Rosso consistency

Toro Rosso's Carlos Sainz lost out at the end of the Hungarian GP which he completed 8th compared to his 6th place on the starting grid.

The Spaniard believed he didn't handle his afternoon of racing in the most optimal way, especially with regard to tyre management in the early part of the race, but he also believed there was not much more he could have extracted from his mount.

"I destroyed my tyres and it meant I couldn't go as long as I wanted on that first stint on the supersoft," explained Sainz.

"Then I went on the soft and we had exactly the same pace in the last stint which was decent."

Sainz spent almost all of Sunday afternoon following countryman Fernando Alonso's McLaren, but believed he could have gone one position better in the end had he enjoyed a 100 percent performance, especially in light of a difficult first day in Hungary.

"Seventh maybe would have been 100% for the weekend but I think we still did 99.9% because the start really was not much I could do.

"With the dirty side and the McLaren starting so well, but then on pace, to hold on to the pace of a McLaren and be quicker than a Williams and of course a Force India after struggling a lot on Friday we certainly cannot really believe it after where we were in FP3.

"Also it’s not like the temperature helped us today, it was really warm and still the car was performing when it’s really warm. So I’m really pleased and a very solid weekend from my side and from the team."

As he scored points in a third consecutive race, the Toro Rosso driver was happy to vaunt his team's much needed consistency.

"Every grand prix since Barcelona that I finished I’ve been in the points, so finally we are talking about that consistency that I needed and the team needed.

"Really solid performances both from the team and my side and I must be really, really pleased with that.

"I think we just stopped having small issues which were hampering us, like reliability issues, small details. In the end in this sport you need all these small little things to come together for you to have good, clean weekends and last year it was impossible to find consistency with the reliability problems.

"This year as soon as we got one result in Barcelona, we managed to go to Monaco and it clicked again. In Canada we kept clicking and yeah we had that Baku one-off but we keep going in the same pace direction even if we are falling back a bit in terms of pace.

"That shows how much the team and myself have matured, that even if we are getting a tiny bit slower every race compared to McLaren or Force India we are still scoring the points, so I think we can be very pleased with that."

AS IT HAPPENED: Hungarian Grand Prix

Breakfast with ... Marc Surer

Silbermann says ... Birds on the wire

Romain Grosjean column: Safety car starts and summer breaks

Keep up to date with all the F1 news via Facebook and Twitter