Carlos Sainz was a rollercoaster of emotions after today’s Qatar GP. On one side, the Spanish driver seemed happy with the points he and his team-mate, Charles Leclerc, took home, extending their gap with McLaren. On the other side, Sainz does not feel very satisfied with his P7 and described his race as “pretty boring”.

The Spaniard started from P5, but he didn’t manage the yellow tyres as he wanted at the start and got overtaken. Not what Ferrari and the two drivers expected to see today, as other midfield teams like AlphaTauri and Alpine seemed to be faster than the Italian team.

Soon after the race, Sainz commented: “We paid our choice to start with the Medium tyres. We knew we had less grip and in addition, my tyres were used. The first part of the race I basically tried to defend myself and not be overtaken by the other drivers, always managing the tyres because we knew it would have been fundamental in the last part of the race. We tried out best to reduce the damages to the front left tyres; we did what McLaren didn’t. Maybe they have been too aggressive and we all saw how it ended”.

On his pace with the hard tyres he said: “ With the hard tyre we had a good pace, but for the same reason we decided to defend and attack just at the final laps of the race. At that point we fully tried to attack Stroll but it was too late. Maybe we could have increased our pace earlier, but we were afraid as we saw what happened with Gasly and Norris, and we wanted to take home as many points as possible”.

The Spaniard added: “I don’t like races where I can’t push but maybe being cautious helped us a lot today”.