The recent excellent form of Carlos Sainz continued as he qualified P9 for the F1 US GP. In the Sprint earlier on Saturday, the 31-year-old avoided the chaos at the start to bag a fine P3.
Speaking in the print media pen after qualifying, Sainz said his P9 grid slot for the F1 US GP was not too big of a surprise. He had beaten both Ferraris and Antonelli in Sprint Qualifying to start P7. However, Hamilton, Leclerc and the Italian all finished ahead in GP qualifying.
Williams have had their struggles regarding tyres in qualifying this year. While that has been less of an issue at some rounds recently, including at COTA, Sainz is expecting the race pace to be stronger once again.
“We are P9, which is the average of the season, so it’s not like we’ve been particularly quick here or anything. It’s just we had a very solid lap yesterday on the sprint that put us in a good track position to then do something at the start and we finished P3.
“I think what is important is that our race pace is always better than our quali pace. Again, I expect tomorrow hopefully to pick up a bit of pace in the race.”
Carlos Sainz explains the strengths and weaknesses of the FW47 at the F1 US GP
With plenty of big bumps around Circuit of the Americas, good ride quality is very important for lap time, as well as having a good car naturally.
In Sector 1 during qualifying, the Spanish driver could match the benchmark runners in it with a 24.9. However, the limitations of the Williams showed in the final sector with plenty of low speed at the start of it. He was the slowest of the top 10 drivers in that section.
“I think we are relatively strong in sector one. We have a very good ride, which has been a trend all year. When it’s bumpy like this, we have a good ride.
“And then everything else really, we have our weaknesses in mid-corner, all the low-speed, the long corners up here, there’s plenty, so a bit of everything.”
Strategy variety in the Grand Prix?
The COTA is notorious for tyre wear as high speed and low speed sections really put strain on them. Pirelli brought the C1, C3 and C4 to Austin this weekend.
Carlos Sainz says it’ll be a potential mix of one and two-stops on Sunday. The last few races have been extremely predictable one-stop races thanks to low degradation.
“I think there’s going to be variety for once, I think one-stop, a question mark over the hard tyre also.
“So yeah, I think there’s going to be one-stop, two-stop, hard tyres, so it’s going to be interesting.”
Low grip at this venue has led to some big deltas between the tyres over a single lap. Could it push teams to use the medium and soft only for the race? Sainz believes that might be a possibility if the hard tyre slides around and is simply too hard to give good grip and pace at this circuit.
“The thing is, every softer compound seems to be giving you a lot of pace, so I don’t know how that will stand up against the hard tomorrow, because it just seems like the softer the compound, the more grip there is.
“And maybe on the hard you could slide a bit more than expected, but I’m not sure.”
