“A bit puzzled to be honest, not happy because ever since I jumped in this car I was very quick in testing so I don’t know where the pace has gone for this weekend. At least we have a good 10 days to analyse what went wrong and put together a plan to come back stronger in Japan.”
This is not the first time Sainz has swapped teams, having moved from Racing Bulls – then known as Toro Rosso – to Renault, to McLaren and then to Ferrari before landing at Williams for 2025. One thing he has always prided himself on is his ability to get straight up to speed, but that is currently not happening at the moment for the Spaniard.
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“One of the strangest swings of performance I have had in my career, going from naturally super quick in Bahrain and Abu Dhabi, even at the beginning of Australia and then suddenly the pace has just seemed to fall away from me,” he continued.
“We did a lot of set-up changes that on my side of the garage, what Alex and I did were pretty similar, on his side [the car] seemed to respond well to the front graining and he was a lot stronger today, on my side it didn’t seem to help much.”
