Carlos Sainz and Bortoleto’s crash: “He has asked for my forgiveness and nothing can be done. These are racing things”
It had come out perfectly with intermediate rubber. He had reached sixth place, although with a car lacking pace. I wanted the points. But when I was eighth, Gabriel Bortoleto took him ahead when trying to attack him on the inside of turn 1 in the F1 Bahrain GP disputed in Malaysia. And there, any hope went to waste.
However, Carlos Sainz had a good gesture with the Brazilian after the race. In statements to ‘DAZN’ and ‘ESPN’, The man from Madrid wanted to downplay the importance of the accident and did not want to blame him for having lost some points that he believes that, despite the great start, he probably would not have been able to achieve for the mistakes that the team made in the stops and for the lack of pace of its car compared to that of its rivals on this track.
“We were having a very good weekend until the contact with Bortoleto, who ruined the race. A shame, because up to that point I thought that scoring points was possible. We didn’t have a bad pace and we had I have made all the choices and everything is fine, but there Gabi has been a little optimistic. He has already come to me to apologize, so nothing can be done. It’s racing stuff. It cost me the opportunity to rate… But would we have scored? “Probably not”Sainz explained.
Nothing that can be done. It is an incident that can happen in races, especially when the track is so delicate.
“Not because then we had two terrible stops, a bad race execution, and a pace that was good compared to Alex (teammate), but compared to the other cars it was not at all good. So it would have been difficult to score points. So at least we have eliminated the errors of stops and so on in a race in which great things were probably not going to happen,” he added on ‘DAZN’.
“Nothing that can be done. It is an incident that can happen in races, especially when the track is so delicate. Gabi has shown a bit of optimism and impatience, because it was a part of the race in which we were both in the points and the only thing we had to do was stay clean and push forward while the others suffered, but well, that’s it, nothing happens, we have to turn the page and know that in any case it was not our day and that as a team later neither “We have done things well,” he reiterated on ‘ESPN’.
Gabi showed a bit of optimism and impatience, because it was a part of the race in which we were in the points and the only thing we had to do was stay clean while the others suffered, but that’s it, nothing happens, we have to turn the page.
He stays with his personal performance
Carlos Sainz wanted to stay with the positive. In a weekend in which he suffered a lot with his car in free practice, always at the back of the table, he made a big step forward in qualifying with a good set-up change thanks to his work with the engineers. He knew how to take advantage of it with two very good laps. And then came his performance on the start, in the wet and in the dry. For this reason, the Spaniard preferred to highlight that good weekend personally, even if his final result was not positive.
“Yes, yesterday I had one of my best classifications of the year or the best. I had a very good start, either wet or dry… on a personal level it has been a good weekend, which due to external factors has gotten a little out of hand, but it’s not like we have a car to score or much more here in Malaysia. Let’s see how it goes in Singapore,” he concluded.
