SAINZ’S REMARKABLE RETURN BREAKS RED BULL’S RUN
He doubted he’d be match fit after missing the previous round, but the Ferrari driver seized his opportunity to take a sensational victory in Melbourne
hen I was about to catch the flight to come to Australia, I was still in bed,” reflected Carlos Sainz of his recovery from the appendicitis that ruled him out of the preceding Saudi Arabian Grand Prix. “I could barely use my abdominal muscles to move. And I was like, ‘This is not going to happen.’ But I took the flight, and suddenly when I landed in Australia, the feeling was a lot better…”
A little over two weeks after going under the knife in Jeddah, Sainz was busy trying not to be too disappointed about missing out on pole position for Ferrari at the Australian GP. A couple of minuscule mistakes, allied to a turnaround in Max Verstappen’s pace after Red Bull had initially struggled for performance at the Albert Park venue, proved to be the difference between the two positions on the front row.
Sainz felt that he needed to be at 100% to beat Verstappen, even if Ferrari’s long-run pace had proved favourable in Friday’s
FP2 session, and questioned whether he would be able to realistically shake off any lingering effects from his operation to dice against the championship leader. As it turned out, the Spaniard was spared that encounter.
Like all things tend to do in contemporary F1, proceedings in Australia began with Verstappen sauntering into the lead. Sainz attempted to probe for potential passing points into the first few corners, but this wasn’t the Red Bull driver’s first rodeo. They, for a short time at least, settled into the order in which they had begun.
There was the added problem of tyre graining to consider, since Pirelli was bold and had taken the three softest grades of rubber to Australia. As a measure to increase strategic variation and prevent the race from being a one-stopper, the softer tyres had offered much in the way of head-scratching throughout the weekend. The C5 soft, particularly the front tyre, tended to saturate under load and cause understeer; suggestions were that, were more sets of the medium C4 available, they might have served as a better qualifying tyre.
“I couldn’t put Max under pressure into Turn 1,” Sainz reckoned, “and from there on it was kind of a very strategic first lap and a half where you are wanting to protect the tyre from opening up the graining.” Reducing lateral sliding was the key to this.
A change to F1’s DRS ruleset has at least given Verstappen a little extra in his first-lap workload to consider, because it can now be activated at the end of the first lap. This has given him the added task of building a lead of a full second on that opening lap. Given the Red Bull’s obvious strengths, he has largely made light work. Not this time, as Sainz crucially held onto the Dutchman’s coat tails to sit on the cusp of getting his first dose of DRS – but there was more at
play in Verstappen’s court, which became apparent as soon as the second lap. On the run to Turn 3, Sainz and Verstappen were separated by the margin you would expect from a slipstream. The Spaniard was about half a tenth faster on the run to the corner, Verstappen reclaimed that back under braking, but the corner exit made the difference; the Red Bull shipped 0.6s to Sainz in just a few metres, uncharacteristically losing speed at the end of the straights. Verstappen’s right-rear brake caliper was stuck, and Sainz could smell blood.
“Basically stuck on from when the lights went off,” Verstappen explained of the caliper after his short-lived race. “The temperatures just kept on increasing until the point, of course, that it caught fire.” First, fleeting wisps of smoke emerged from his RB20; next, those wisps metamorphosed into great plumes, their intensity growing as Verstappen’s pace fell. At the time Sainz caught him with DRS along Lakeside Drive and successfully reeled off his play for the lead, Verstappen was about 16mph shy.
Although the Ferrari was now ahead, Verstappen attempted to cling on. With DRS, the top-end speed arrears were more or less reversed, suggesting that the catching brake wasn’t sapping too much in outright straightline speed. But data traces do show that, when Verstappen was turning right on the following lap, he was shedding speed quite considerably. The exit of Turn 7 and the highspeed Turn 10 were both accompanied by a drop in velocity relative to Sainz, only alleviated when the steering wheel was turned anticlockwise. It ultimately proved moot because the temperatures were rising, and shards of carbon eventually sprayed out of the wheel hub like an emptied buckshot.
The Australian crowd roared as it became apparent that Verstappen was out of the race. Nothing personal; the spectators simply wanted a different winner rather than another 10-victory streak from F1’s current pre-eminent force. Sainz now had the lead, with the pack of Lando Norris, Charles Leclerc and Oscar Piastri in pursuit.
“I was confident about the first half of the race that I was going to be OK, because it’s more or less the laps that I did on Friday,” Sainz reckoned. After all, Ferrari’s representative race pace in FP2 had looked pretty handy; Leclerc had been the faster of the two drivers over a stint on the medium tyres, factoring at the top of the average time order ahead of Norris’s Mclaren. Aston Martin and Mercedes had been behind, so it had already been established that there was little threat. Red Bull only had a stint from Sergio Perez to count on after Verstappen’s delayed start to second practice cost him a chance of a long run on Friday. The Mexican’s 12-lap stint was behind that of Aston and Mercedes; different fuel loads might apply here, but it was evident that he was not really making inroads into the top four drivers in race trim.
Sainz may not have been in touch with Leclerc during FP2, but the Madrid-born driver had certainly had his Weetabix on Saturday
morning. The balance seemed to shift between the two; Sainz had a car that he could use to great effect in qualifying, while Leclerc appeared to be second-best – and the disparity in track position was another mitigating factor in the race.
If Leclerc was going to have a hope of beating Sainz, he’d have to get Norris out of the way first. The proliferation of higher-speed corners heightened Mclaren’s performance over the likes of Aston Martin and Mercedes, putting both Norris and home hero Piastri well into the mix. But Sainz dropped that trio with moderate ease, telling the team that he was intending to “open the gap and go long”. Leclerc, frustrated behind Norris, opted to pit at the end of the ninth lap and Piastri followed him, leaving the front two to go deeper into the race on their opening set of medium tyres.
When Norris stopped at the end of lap 14 for the hard tyre, this handed Leclerc and Piastri an undercut advantage and the Briton dropped to a net fourth place. Sainz kept going for another two laps before making his hard-tyre switch, coming back onto the field with a solid lead – albeit one nearly wiped out by a virtual safety car: Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes had given up the ghost at the end of that lap and crawled to a stop just after Turn 10.
Upon the lap 18 restart, Sainz’s lead over Leclerc had briefly fallen to below a second, although this was restored thanks to the leader having more room to manoeuvre with his younger tyres. The gap between the two Ferraris therefore grew by about half a second per lap, and Leclerc admitted that he had not done a particularly stellar job of managing his first set of hard tyres.
“I think nowadays you need to be 100% to beat Max – and today I wasn’t,” Carlos Sainz mused after qualifying, where he just missed out on pole to Max Verstappen despite headlining both Q1 and Q2 in the lead-up to the top 10 shootout. A mere two weeks after abdominal surgery to remove his appendix, Sainz admitted that lingering discomfort remained as he returned to the wheel of his Ferrari – but this hardly stopped him from impressing.
Red Bull, by contrast, had been on the back foot through much of the weekend. Issues with set-up had handed Verstappen too much in the way of understeer, sapping his times through the final sector. Sainz’s performances in Q1 and Q2 had marked the Spaniard out as the favourite for pole in qualifying’s final crescendo – but Verstappen is hardly one to concede defeat so soon.
Sainz opened his Q3 account with a 1m16.331s, a lap just over a tenth shy of his best in Q2. In contrast, Verstappen bagged a 1m16.048s on his first run, delivering a sucker-punch to Ferrari’s hopes of a first pole of 2024. The Dutchman found even more time to secure the fastest lap, posting an impressive 1m15.915s. Sainz’s final 1m16.185s was not enough to challenge him, but at least booked a front-row start. “I didn’t really feel like I was fighting for pole,” Verstappen mused. “But then we made some little tickles on the car and that seemed to help me in Q3 to really push it to the limit.”
Sainz, who felt that missing most of Jeddah had cost vital track time with the
SF-24, saw the sunny side and stated: “If you would have told me even five days ago, when I travelled here still recovering, that I could be on the grid and fighting for pole, I would have taken it.”
Sergio Perez had initially collected third, but was handed a three-place grid penalty for impeding Nico Hulkenberg in Q1. This promoted Lando Norris into third and Charles Leclerc, who had aborted his final lap after a snap at Turn 12, onto the second row. Home hero Oscar Piastri was also shuffled up to fifth to share the third row with the demoted Perez.
Mercedes made Q3 with only one driver; George Russell picked up seventh on the grid, ahead of Yuki Tsunoda and the two Aston Martins, while Lewis Hamilton was dumped out at the end of Q2 with his W15 proving particularly troublesome on a flying lap. He had been on the cusp of the elimination zone at the death of the session, and Tsunoda and Lance Stroll leapfrogged the seven-time champion to consign him to 11th, his worst Melbourne qualifying result since 2010. For his part, Stroll outqualified Fernando Alonso after the Spanish veteran went off at Turn 6 during his first flying lap.
“We made some little tickles on the car and that seemed to help me really push it to the limit”
“THE TEMPERATURES JUST KEPT ON INCREASING UNTIL THE POINT, OF COURSE, THAT IT CAUGHT FIRE”
This left the Monegasque vulnerable to the advances of Norris. Mclaren enacted a swap between its two drivers on lap 29 of 58 owing to Norris’s greater pace, and Piastri agreed that it was the right call – even if it would deny him a home podium finish.
Leclerc’s heavy-handedness with the first set of hard tyres gave
Norris the impetus to close to within two seconds of the Ferrari, and it was at this point where the parallel universes diverged.
“On the lap we were going to undercut, he boxed,” Norris said of that fork in the road, when Leclerc stopped at the end of lap 34 for a second set of hards. “So you have to go off and do kind of a different strategy. We got close in the second stint; if I boxed, I think I would have undercut. But he boxed, so I missed that opportunity. You always think, what happens if we did it one lap earlier?”
This forced Norris into waiting until lap 40 for his final stop. Had he gone at the same time as Leclerc, he’d have lost track position anyway, so holding on for six more laps at least offered a tyre offset – even if it contributed little in the remaining third of the race as Leclerc rather cracked the code of keeping the hard tyres alive.
Sainz stopped on the following lap and returned to the circuit five seconds clear of Leclerc, a lead that he managed to keep relatively static until the final three laps. It was the race leader’s tyres that started falling away, and this allowed Leclerc to shrink his teammate’s advantage, taking over a second out of it by the end of the penultimate lap. Sainz will have been delighted to see the signs of a virtual safety car on that final tour of the circuit, when George Russell hit the Turn 6 wall when trying to pass and avoid a slow
moving Fernando Alonso ahead of him. Race neutralised, Sainz had won his third grand prix – the second of those enshrined by Russell’s appearance in the wall.
“It’s the whole start to the year in general, how the year started with the news of the non-renewal [at Ferrari for 2025],” Sainz explained. “Then you get yourself fit. You get yourself ready for the start of the season, pushing flat out. And then you get to Bahrain.
You do a good podium. You say, ‘OK, now the season is starting well and I can keep the momentum going.’ And suddenly, boom, you’re missing a race in Jeddah and the operation.
“Long days in bed, not knowing if I was going to be back in time. Obviously, a lot of unknowns. ‘Am I going to be back fit? Am I going to be back feeling still good with the car?’ And then suddenly you come back and win. So, yes, what I said on the radio – life is a rollercoaster sometimes, but it can be good to you sometimes.
Just letting it sink in and enjoying the moment.
“Obviously, the second half of the race was a bit of an unknown. But yeah, once I got up in front and I had a gap, you can manage everything. You can manage yourself, you can manage the tyres, you have less pressure. You can choose your places where to push and not to push you know, and everything becomes a lot easier.”
But here’s the real poser: could Sainz have won the grand prix had Verstappen stayed in it? Assuming the Dutchman retained a healthy car, there’s more than just anecdotal evidence to suggest that he wouldn’t have necessarily had it all his own way versus his former Toro Rosso team-mate. And that goes back to practice.
Verstappen’s lack of a representative FP2 long run was due to the lingering impacts of an FP1 kerb strike that knocked some of his Red Bull parts loose, but he made up for it with an eight-lap stint during FP3. Averaging his laps on the medium tyres for that stint, he looked strong with 1m22.882s, versus Perez’s FP3 long run on the same compound that yielded an average of 1m23.287s.
That’s a four-tenth gap, one that has been of a similar magnitude throughout their partnership at the Red Bull squad, so we can use that to estimate where Verstappen might have stacked up in the FP2 session against the Ferraris. Assuming Perez’s average time of 1m23.808s from FP2, Verstappen would likely have managed
“LIFE IS A ROLLERCOASTER SOMETIMES, BUT IT CAN BE GOOD TO YOU. JUST LETTING IT SINK IN”