Carlos Sainz says he nearly crashed twice in the closing stages of Q3 as he slumped to a low-key ninth place in Australia.
Sainz was seconds away from completing his first push lap in Q3 when Alpine’s Fernando Alonso crashed and brought out the red flag.
Sainz was then delayed returning to the circuit, leaving him with only one push lap, and a couple of mistakes left him down as the slowest of the nine remaining contenders.
“I was in the fight for pole the whole weekend, then in Q3 we had the red flag when I was on a good lap, and couldn’t put a banker in,” he explained.
“Then on the second Q3 lap we are investigating what happened because the engine wouldn’t start so I went out three minutes late.
“In the run plan, we need two laps to get the tyres to work, I couldn’t do the two laps, so I started the lap with freezing cold tyres, and from there on the lap on cold tyres was just scrappy, I nearly crashed twice, and you could not put a lap together.
“It is tremendously unfortunate to have these two issues in the Q3 laps when I was in the fight for pole since Q1.”
Sainz quipped that “you can imagine the anger I have inside me right now” because “I didn’t even qualify high up, it should have been at least the first row and a good fight for the win tomorrow.”
He was downbeat over his prospects of mounting a charge through in race trim.
“We’ll stay aggressive, tomorrow is a day to try and go forward, but at the same time the midfield is tighter this weekend, the midfield is closer to everyone else,” he said.
“We don’t have the advantage we had in Bahrain or other places.
“It’ll be a tougher race, and they removed the fourth DRS zone, which means overtaking now will go back to being extremely difficult and it is the worst possible scenario for me.”
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