Sainz understands reasons for poor Baku showing and is “hoping it was a one-off” · RaceFans

Carlos Sainz Jnr is going into this weekend’s Miami Grand Prix hoping to rebound from a difficult weekend in Azerbaijan where he lagged well off his team mate’s pace.

Charles Leclerc put the other Ferrari on pole position in Baku while Sainz was over eight-tenths of a second off the pace. While Leclerc scored the team’s first podium finish of the season behind the dominant Red Bulls, Sainz came in 24 seconds behind in fifth place.

Sainz told media including RaceFans in Miami he has “a pretty good idea of what might have happened in Baku” and is hopeful he can return to his more competitive form of previous races this weekend.

“Obviously, you’re never 100% certain, but that’s part of the sport. There’s good weekends, there’s bad weekends.

“Just looking at the positives out of a bad weekend we managed to come back in P5 and not do any mistakes, bring home the points for the team and now obviously very happy to move on and to be in Miami and try to do a good bounce-back.”

He said that in “Australia – the last normal track that we went to” he “felt really good with the car”. Sainz ran fourth in the closing stages of that race before being penalised for a collision with Fernando Alonso.

“Just in Baku I had an off weekend,” he continued. “But I’m hoping it was a one-off.”

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Sainz admitted it is more challenging to optimise the handling of the team’s latest car. “It is true that this year it’s more difficult to get the car into sweet spot with the set-up.

“This car is a bit more on the edge with many things. We’ve been struggling a bit this year since the winter testing to find the sweet spot of the set-up. But we’ve done a lot of progress on that so far and I feel like I understand the car.”

However Sainz said he doesn’t mind having a car which is difficult to set up if the team can find the performance to challenge Red Bull.

“For sure in the end you would prefer an overall fast car, you don’t care if it’s a bit difficult to put in the sweet spot. I think just now Red Bull are just quicker, a lot quicker everywhere and especially in the race looking at Baku.

“The limitation of this car is more how on the edge it is and how difficult it is to find the sweet spot. And also it’s quite a peaky car as we saw since day one of testing and we’re trying to improve it.”