It was a good qualifying session for Ferrari, as both drivers Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz  managed to outperform and will start in front of both McLaren drivers, their direct rivals in the fight for the P3 in the constructors' championship, which sees the English team ahead of the Scuderia by 7.5 points.

🇺🇸 P5, so good result overall. The only downside is starting on the Soft. We were confident track evolution was going our way but the wind picked up and the track got slower when we put on the Medium. Full focus on trying to make it work in the race!

👉https://t.co/6pGT14IseJ pic.twitter.com/vHBSlVxQzq

— Carlos Sainz (@Carlossainz55) October 23, 2021

Sainz qualified in P6, but will start tomorrow's race in P5 due to Mercedes's Valtteri Bottas picking up a 5-place grid penalty. However, he won't have the easiest race at COTA as the Spaniard will begin it on softs:

"No, no, not a gamble – just a compromised situation that we saw that we wanted to do the soft first and then beat the lap time on the medium, and then the track got a bit slower at the end of Q2," Sainz recalled the reasons why he had to get out of Q2 on the softer compound.

He also admitted that it's going to be a disadvantage, and that the team will look into the way the mediums didn't act as planned:

"No one improved in the second run. And we had reserved the medium for the second run and normally it’s quicker but this time it was slower because the wind picked up, so we need to analyse what we could have done differently there because it obviously puts us on the back foot going into tomorrow."

The Spanish driver, in his first year with Ferrari, added that, while starting on reds might be a good choice in the first minutes of the race, it'll make the rest of it extremely hard:

"For the first 10 metres, yes; after one corner, you want mediums. There’s one positive but a lot of negatives in that sense, so a bit on the back foot going into tomorrow. but we’ll try our best and see what we can do differently."

Summing up, Sainz still feels quite confident about his race, considering the strong pace Ferrari showed in the practice session, especially in FP3 where he signed the second fastest lap:

"Overall it’s a good result and I’ve felt confident with the car the whole weekend. The two laps in Q3 were consistent and pretty strong so I’m quite happy with that. The only downside is that I will be the only one in the top eight starting the race on the Soft."

"Right now it’s time to focus on how to make my strategy work as well as possible tomorrow. We have good pace, the car feels good and we know we have to be aggressive. Let’s see how everything unfolds tomorrow," he concluded.