Carlos Sainz hits out at strategy: “Williams is stronger than Ferrari and Mercedes, but race day is always chaos”. Carlos Sainz criticizes Williams’ race strategy after finishing eighth at Imola.

Carlos Sainz, eighth and frustrated
At one point it seemed that Sunday at Imola could deliver a sensational result for the team, at certain moments even holding third place solidly with Alex Albon. Things, however, turned out differently for the Williams of Carlos Sainz, who got stuck in the midfield battle and behind slower cars also due to the two-stop strategy, which made him lose the leading group. That’s also why the Spaniard, despite an eighth-place finish that’s far from worthless, said he was rather unhappy with how the team executed the strategic plan, effectively wasting a much higher performance potential.

Williams, Sainz Jr’s words
“I’m a bit unhappy,” said the former Ferrari driver at the interview ring after the end of the F1 Emilia-Romagna GP, “after another weekend where we had quite a strong pace. I think in the race we were fast enough to aim for the top five. We were stronger than the Mercedes and the Ferraris, and honestly I felt very good all weekend. For some reason, though, we can never find peace on Sundays with the proper execution of the race strategy.”

The reasons for the disappointing result are once again to be found in the imperfect strategy, which led Sainz to pit early to cover the undercut from former teammate Charles Leclerc: “In the end we obviously stopped too early. We just need to keep making progress to understand each other a bit better during the races, because right now this is costing us a lot of points. If at this point in the season we’re already showing this level in terms of car speed and driving feel, I know we can only get better moving forward. But I’ll stay positive and keep pushing all of us to continue improving as a team.”

Williams, fighting with Ferrari and Mercedes is possible
“It’s strange, because if you had told me a few races ago, or even a year ago, that we’d be fighting with Mercedes and Ferrari on race pace at these tracks and that I’d be angry over an eighth-place finish, I wouldn’t have believed it. That obviously doesn’t make me very happy, because I know we have the potential and speed to beat these teams on this kind of track, but it seems like on Sundays we just can’t do our job properly. It just means that as a team we need to improve, understand each other a bit better, and make sure we don’t complicate life for ourselves too much on Sundays. Today I didn’t expect to have to recover from 15th place, which made things difficult for me. But in the end I managed it,” concluded the Williams driver, Carlos Sainz Jr.