McLaren’s Carlos Sainz Jr. believes that the squad’s qualifying display in China proved it was correct not to get over-excited with its display at the last event in Bahrain.
McLaren secured a double Q3 appearance in Bahrain and Sainz Jr. battled Red Bull’s Max Verstappen early on, before Lando Norris went on to finish sixth, its best race result in over a year.
Sainz Jr. nonetheless cautioned that the rear-limited nature of Sakhir’s layout played to McLaren’s strengths, and reckoned the front-limited Shanghai circuit would expose the MCL34’s limitations.
Sainz Jr.’s concerns were justified as he classified 14th during qualifying, with team-mate Norris the slowest of the 15 runners in Q2.
With the team-mates of Lance Stroll and non-participants Alexander Albon and Antonio Giovinazzi both finishing ahead of McLaren in Q2, it left the Woking-based team as the second-slowest team on Saturday.
“I’m quite disappointed today with 14th, but already in FP3 we saw that it was going to be very difficult to get into Q3,” said Sainz Jr.
“We knew coming into Shanghai that it was going to be a tough circuit for us and it was going to expose more our limitations.
“However, I think we managed to put together a decent qualifying. Maybe I missed a tenth or tenth and a half on my last run, but overall I think I extracted pretty much all our potential from the car.
“We’ll analyse and work on our weaknesses and we’ll prepare ourselves for the race as best as possible.”
Norris echoed Sainz Jr.’s stance on McLaren’s performance and reckons it is an aspect the team needs to understand and improve.
“Today was obviously not as good as the past two weekends but, on the whole, I don’t think it was horrendous,” stressed Norris.
“There’s still some work to do with the car. Overall, there wasn’t a lot more to gain today: Carlos was quicker than me – but he wasn’t ahead of anyone else. I think he did a really good job of getting the most out of the car.
“This track just doesn’t suit our car, compared to the previous two. It’s just an area we have to work on.”
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