Carlos Sainz had damage from Lewis Hamilton incident in F1 Brazil GP, as both he and Alexander Albon lamented no points in a close midfield fight.
It wasn’t the F1 Brazil GP that the Williams pair had hoped for after a decent start. Even though they knew that the circuit will not suit their car, they still had hopes of a good run in the lower round of points. But straight up, Sainz had an incident with Hamilton into Turn 1.
The Spaniard was sandwiched in the middle and touched Hamilton, which damaged his car. Despite that, he was hovering just outside the points in the long pack of cars led by Liam Lawson. Yeah, I got squeezed by…I think it was Lewis on the outside and I picked up a front wing damage that compromised my race for the rest of the race,” said Sainz to media.
“I was a lot of points down on my front wing and as a consequence the rest of the car. We wouldn’t have lost too much time and you’re better off adding flaps, trying to compensate it and going for it. Today is the first day I felt 100% and actually the car also felt a lot better [than the weekend]. We managed to stay in the race, managed to stay in the hunt for points.
“Then a slow pit stop when we were going to undercut a few cars. Also another step back. And from there, yeah, just always chasing the points. We were always P11, P12, P11, P12, hanging on there with a damaged car. But yeah, in the end we were just a few seconds away from the points, which probably without the damage and without the slow speed, so potentially we could have been there.
“But yeah, at least the car, until then it felt a lot better than the rest of the weekend,” summed up Sainz, whose teammate Albon was also part of the pack. In fact, he missed out on points by just finishing 11th. He felt his strategy wasn’t correct as they waited far too long to pit which compromised his run. “Good race for the fans, nice deg on the tyres which made it interesting,” said Albon.
“For us, it was a race to forget, we had good pace and we could show it. We had bad pace all-weekend but we seem to have recovered it in the race. In the end, what took us out of contention was that we stayed out too long in the first stint. We couldn’t recover from there. We lost so much track time, we were quick and we were fighting our way back up the grid but we just missed out at the end of the race.”
Pre-race, it was fun for the Williams F1 pair as a video emerged of Sainz and Albon ran to the car to be used in the parade lap. They both wanted to drive, with the Thai winning the race. Later on, they were found to have cut most part of Sector 2 in a bid to win the parade lap race. They eventually finished third due to lack of power, as explained by the drivers.
Here’s video: https://x.com/WilliamsRacing/status/1987811019918295330?s=20
https://x.com/WilliamsRacing/status/1988576150071964143?s=20
https://x.com/WilliamsRacing/status/1989407992769368481?s=20
Here’s Luke Browning getting FP1 run in Abu Dhabi GP