Carlos Sainz admits Baku qualifying was tougher than expected: “It surprised many drivers”. Carlos Sainz secured a front row start alongside Max Verstappen in Baku.

F1 | Qualifying on the edge in Baku, Sainz admits: “It surprised many drivers”

In the tricky conditions of Baku, Carlos Sainz Jr. secured a front row start alongside Max Verstappen. At the end of the session, the Williams driver revealed some of the key factors that made qualifying so challenging.

The Azerbaijan Grand Prix qualifying session proved to be one of the most complicated of the season so far. Many drivers struggled to put together a clean lap, such as Lewis Hamilton, while others made mistakes that ended their qualifying prematurely. Carlos Sainz Jr. had briefly secured provisional pole in the final minutes, but a superb lap from Max Verstappen snatched it away. The Spanish driver from Madrid will therefore start from second on the grid in tomorrow’s race. Strong winds and a light drizzle made Q2 and Q3 in Baku especially difficult for the drivers to manage.

The difficulties of qualifying

Despite finishing second, Carlos Sainz Jr. pointed out several critical aspects of the session that could have caught even the most experienced drivers off guard: “The difficult thing today was, first of all, finding rhythm, because you weren’t really completing laps, you weren’t finishing them, and you weren’t spending much time on track. Every time we came back into the pits for ten minutes, it was hard to understand what the track would be like when going back out, how the tyres would behave, where the wind would be. So every outing was a bit of an adventure.”

The risks on track today were extremely high, as a circuit like Baku does not forgive errors. Sainz admitted: “And I think that’s why there were so many crashes. If you then consider that modern F1 cars are much harder to drive in the wind than in the rain — it’s totally unpredictable. Today it surprised a lot of drivers — probably it was the wind — and that says a lot. I don’t think people watching from home can really understand how difficult the conditions were today, and how easy it was to end up in the wall. I mean, if out of the 20 best drivers in the world, seven or eight crash, it shows the session was really on the edge.”

A near miss for pole

Even though he narrowly missed out on pole position, Carlos Sainz Jr. expressed satisfaction with his performance: “I knew my lap was good, but probably not good enough for pole. I mean, we know that if a McLaren or a Red Bull manages to put together a clean lap, they gain on average three to five tenths. And even if the track conditions had been good enough – which was the big question mark – I knew my lap still wouldn’t have been enough.”