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
JAKE BOXALL-LEGGE
RACE CENTRE
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 whe
