Bearman wants to ‘give Sainz’s car back’

In brief

Bearman hopes Sainz recovers soon

Ferrari may need the services of substitute driver Bearman again at the next round of the world championship at Melbourne in two weeks’ time. Sainz is recovering from surgery on his appendix last week.

Asked whether he will be in the car again in Australia, Bearman said: “Honestly, I’m not sure. I hope not. That’s not to say I don’t want to be in the car, but I wish Carlos the very best and I hope he feels better.”

“It’s his car, and I feel like I shouldn’t be in his car, I should give it back to him so he can have another turn,” Bearman told Channel 4.

Sauber must fix wheel nut problem – Zhou

Zhou Guanyu urged his Sauber team to solve the wheel nut problems which caused slow pit stops for both drivers over the opening races. He believes he was on course to repeat his 11th place finish from the opening race until he lost 25 seconds at his pit stop.

“This was definitely not my weekend,” said Zhou, who crashed heavily in final practice on Saturday and was unable to participate in qualifying. “The race was difficult in the beginning, but we managed to go quite long on the medium compound tyres before pitting for new softs.

“We would have comfortably finished in P11 but unfortunately the pit stop compromised my race. We encountered another issue with a cross-threaded nut, something that we, as a team, are investigating. We need to understand how this happened and improve to make sure it doesn’t occur again.”

Hadjar frustrated by third failure in four races

An unimpressed Isack Hadjar failed to reach the chequered flag in either of last weekend’s Formula 2 races in Jeddah after his car’s engine twice went into safe mode. Having also retired from the feature race in Bahrain, he hasn’t scored since taking fourth place in the season-opener.

“We did no mileage going into the qualifying due to a problem with the car,” the Red Bull junior driver added. In the sprint race he “was hurting too much the front right tyre” and slipped back, but “I was sixth on-track, where I would’ve finished until I had a mechanical issue and had to retire. With Verschoor penalised, it would’ve been P5.”

He believes a better result was possible in the feature race. “We executed a good pit stop. A few laps later I managed to…