Carlos Sainz Jnr says the Shanghai International Circuit has revealed some of McLaren’s weaknesses after both the team’s cars qualified outside the top 10.
“We knew before coming here that this track could expose our weaknesses a lot more than the other two tracks that we’ve been to this season,” said Sainz. “So we kind of, not expected to be weaker, but we expected to struggle a bit more.”The team’s pace in practice had given them some encouragement, Sainz admitted. “After FP2 yesterday I think everyone in the team was really encouraged about the pace and I was very encouraged today also.”
However they expected it would be “more difficult” to reach Q3. “To be P14 and 15 is maybe a bit more disappointing because I was thinking about P11, P12 for the start tomorrow after FP3 and after the first laps of quali.
“I put some seriously good laps together today and I think we just didn’t have the pace. So we’ll analyse why. We knew coming into here that this track would expose our weaknesses so probably FP2 yesterday gave us a bit more encouragement than we should and today we came a bit back to reality.”
Sainz is hopeful some of the team’s set-up changes will pay off more in the race than they did today.
“[The race] can be another story,” he said. “We did a few changes in the set-up from yesterday to today to try and improve the race pace. That maybe made ups look slower today and stronger tomorrow. So let’s hope it’s like that and we can keep pushing.”
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Todfod (@todfod)
13th April 2019, 10:22
Reality check for Mclaren fans as well.. they had two good races, which wasn’t all that different to 2018. They’ve got a lot of work to do.
Hopefully, James Key can help drive their in season development with a better direction.. even though it’s not his car design.
antybuc
13th April 2019, 12:27
No worries. McLaren has good race pace. Renault and Haas aren’t perform amazingly aswell, so I think both of them are in McLaren reach. What they (McLaren) need the most compared to last season is to keep developing this year car. Only then they will stay in the mix and maybe become new best of the rest team of 2019.