Carlos Sainz says it was not possible in the end to defend against Valtteri Bottas in F1 US GP, which cost him a place.
Even with the pace they had, Ferrari had struggles with tyre overheat/management during the F1 United States GP, with the weather temperature in Austin different from two years ago when Formula One last came to Texas.
Sainz was in thick of things in F1 US GP all-through. He explained how he struggled to defend his position against Mercedes’ Bottas at the end after the battle against McLaren’s Daniel Ricciardo. His contact with him when the Spaniard tried to pass didn’t help him when fighting against the Finn who got through him.
“With Valtteri, I was defending for a few laps, yes,” said Sainz to written media. “Obviously, he’s in a Mercedes, so you can imagine that it was quite difficult to keep him behind. I managed to do it for five or six laps, and then my tires started to overheat really a lot because I had already used them a lot to pass Ricciardo, and after the contact that I had with Ricciardo, I had a bit of car damage.
“I had the tyres really, really high on temperature, and I was trying my best to keep Valtteri behind, but in the end, he got me with DRS, a pretty clean, easy move for him, and I couldn’t keep him behind. It was actually a fun battle, it was a fun five laps,” summed up Sainz, who finished seventh, making it six points finishes in COTA.
For Bottas, who had to take a five-place grid penalty after fitting a sixth engine finished sixth and had some struggles himself starting from behind and fighting back to get by many cars ahead of him especially both AlphaTauris.
“It was difficult like I expected,” said Bottas to written media. “What made it more tricky was that in the first stint I was behind the AlphaTauris and I couldn’t get by, obviously lost quite a bit of time. Unfortunately, there was no help of safety car or anything. I made some progress but slowly.”
Even before the race, Mercedes expected a tough outing for Bottas from the fag end of the Top 10. But as James Vowles explained in the post-race debrief, it was not straight forward for the Finn to get through relatively faster cars due to the conditions and DRS not helping with lesser time difference.
“It wasn’t unique to Valtteri, you saw this up and down the field,” said Vowles. “If I take the example of Verstappen and Lewis, in stint one of the race Verstappen was seven tenth behind Lewis all stint clearly faster but unable to overtake. Right at the end of the race, Lewis had a tyre advantage to Verstappen when Verstappen was dropping off the tyre curves and Lewis couldn’t get close enough to overtake. It wasn’t unique to Valtteri.
“It’s difficult on circuits and obviously it becomes more exaggerated on certain circuits relative to others. In Austin, you are getting a lot of tyre overheating. Everyone is and when you are the car behind, you suffer more from that than the car in front of you. You are sliding around on the tyres, you lose downforce and the closer you get to the car in front the more downforce you lose and therefore the more you slide around on the tyres, the more overheating you get.
“The DRS is clearly a tool that enables us therefore to get through a car when you have a large performance differential, but for it to be effective you have to be within half a second, six tenths on corner exit before you open DRS for it to work. And in the case of Valtteri it was very, very hard to do that. You saw in fact at the end of the race what he did is back off from Sainz, allow his tyres to cool down and then attacked one more time and did now get the position and that’s why. It’s very, very difficult for a number of laps to sit there and wait as your tyres are overheating. You’ve actually got to let them recover and try one more time.”
The story was written by Oprah Sagal
Here’s Carlos Sainz on fighting Lando Norris, Daniel Ricciardo on Lap 1
Here’s Daniel Ricciardo and Carlos Sainz on dirty racing
Here’s Yuki Tsunoda on defending against Valtteri Bottas
