Carlos Sainz Jnr finished closest to the Red Bull drivers in Bahrain and doubts there was much more he could have done to catch them.
But he suspects the world champions’ advantage won’t be as great in future races.
Sainz qualified fifth for yesterday’s race but passed his team mate Charles Leclerc and George Russell to finish third. Although he appeared to have an opportunity to close on Sergio Perez for second place, he never thought it was realistic given what they’d seen of Red Bull’s pace.
“You need to consider that we’ve been testing here three days and I’ve been seeing that Red Bull degradation on soft and it’s exactly the same as ours on the hard,” said Sainz. “So as soon as I knew Red Bull had a new soft for the last stint, and Checo had it, it’s not like I went, ‘okay, this is my chance’.
“I’ve seen the long runs they did on the soft tyre in testing, and you could see that they basically have the same deg[radation] on the soft as what everyone has on the hard. So I wasn’t getting too excited.”
Perez’s first stint on softs was only 12 laps long, though Max Verstappen went five laps further. There were 21 laps remaining when Perez switched to softs for his final stint, one lap after Sainz took hards.
At first Perez edged clear, then Sainz started to match his pace. Over the final six laps Sainz was quicker every time, but the gap between them still stood at 2.7 seconds when the chequered flag dropped.
Sainz said Red Bull’s ability to make the soft tyre last so long was always going to make them difficult to beat.
“When I saw the long runs of Max and Checo in FP2 and then the long runs of testing, there’s no secrets. We’ve been here three days. I knew they had a three or four-tenth advantage – maybe not half a second like George was saying – depending on track conditions. But I knew it was going to be very difficult to beat the Red Bulls.
“They also kept a new soft [tyre set], which shows a bit what the intentions and their plans were. I knew the Red Bulls today were going to be very, very difficult to beat. So to keep up with one of them and have the possibility to fight is already a good surprise.”
However Sainz is more confident about his chances of being able to challenge Red Bull at lower-degradation circuits. “I think we were at one of their strongest tracks of the season with very high tyre deg at the rear.
“Hopefully when we go to a more front-limited track…
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