Carlos Sainz planning to 'attack' sister Red Bull cars in Monaco
Carlos Sainz qualified an impressive sixth for Toro Rosso in Monaco, immediately behind the two Red Bull cars of Max Verstappen and Daniel Ricciardo, after the Italian team backed up its strong Thursday performance when it mattered.
Sainz says he will attack from the start, even though the two cars ahead are from STR’s sister team.
“I always attack,” he said. “I don’t know what Helmut Marko will tell me! But I always want to attack from the beginning, because to go into a race defending, is I think the worst thing you can do to your approach and your self-esteem. So I’m going to attack at the start, and then I’m going to be patient.
“It’s a long race, more than 70 laps, you just need to be quite lucky with the safety cars, with the timing, we saw with the F2 race you probably depend on the right timing of your pit stop to maintain position or gain position here, so we need to put an eye on the midfield because they are going to try some crazy things which could well work, or could not, and we need to be keep an eye on them.”
Sainz was particularly pleased that STR was able to respond after other midfield teams showed well early in qualifying.
“Very happy. It has been an exciting qualifying for us. We hit the track in Q1, and the midfield teams caught back a lot more than we expected, they were putting a lot of pressure on us, we were 11th, 12th, ninth, something like that in Q1, and we had to start doing laps on the limit in Q1, which is something I don’t like at Monaco, I prefer to build it up little by little!
“In Q2 the same stuff, and in Q3, the best lap of the weekend up until now, the lap where I went for it 100 percent, and it came really well together. It was a lot closer than on Thursday, on Thursday we were easily the fourth fastest team on track, and today in Q1 everyone was starting to get nervous because we saw the midfield had caught back. To wait for Q3 to do the best lap of the weekend was a great effort from all of us.
“It’s a good surprise for all of us, because it has been a tricky first five races for us, I think we all expected a bit more from the car and the pace, and suddenly to get this P6 in Monaco is the best boost for everyone.”
Sainz admitted that the team had surprised itself with this weekend’s form.
“We put the same car on track that we had in Barcelona. We obviously had to adapt the setup for this kind of track, and all of a sudden we see ourselves P4. The analysis has to be done. Probably there are not a lot of straights here, and this is helping us.
“Second, I think we have a good car in terms of mechanical grip, which is something maybe last year we were not as good. As I’ve said on many occasions, the car is more complete. Sometimes in other racetracks the stop watch is not as fast as we would like.”
