Carlos Sainz fears McLaren could be dropping behind their midfield rivals despite a fifth place finish at the Eifel Grand Prix.
The Spaniard had a fairly inconspicuous race at the Nurburgring, benefitting more from the issues impacting those around him than making his way up the field.
And indeed, commenting back in the paddock, Sainz admits it was a result that didn’t bring a great amount of joy.
“It’s a fifth place that tastes good because it’s 10 points, but when you’re suffering in the race for 60 laps, you end up a little out of place,” he told Spanish broadcaster Movistar.
“I’m not very happy, actually. It is a fifth-place that tastes little when you see [Daniel] Ricciardo and [Sergio] Perez ahead [fighting for a place] on the podium, and that we have missed an opportunity to fight for that podium.
“With the car I had today I couldn’t fight for the podium, but maybe with the one I had two races ago, maybe I could.”
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For this weekend, Sainz was using the latest upgrade package on the McLaren, but the loss of Friday practice meant he went into Sunday largely blind as to how it would perform.
Perhaps then it was no surprise that he struggled more compared to teammate Lando Norris, who was in the battle for third before his own retirement.
“We had much more [tyre] graining than the rest,” Carlos revealed. “The car goes a lot from the nose and that costs you more degradation.
“But I hope this will serve to get 60 laps of analysis and data and go back to the factory to investigate what is in this new package that does not just give me a good feeling and does not give us the sensations and performance we expected.”
Those answers do need to come quickly though after McLaren lost third place in the Constructors’ standings over the weekend.
“There is going to be a lot of thinking process going into the next couple of weeks to decide what we do with the car, what upgrades we decide to keep, how we develop this car,” Sainz continued.
“At the moment, Renault is two tenths quicker than us, Racing Point is one or two tenths quicker than us and that means if we want to finish higher in the championship we need to find a bit [of time].”
As for teammate Norris, an engine issue was his undoing at the Nurburgring as he spent much of the race managing settings before eventually, the unit failed.
“Today wasn’t our day in any way really,” said the Briton. “The first quarter was really good – good opening lap, good pace and then it all started to go very wrong.
“We kept fighting, we had the problems around Lap 20, 25 and found some ways of managing it but it was very difficult. I was having to press buttons and do things on every straight on every lap.
“So it was very tricky and took a lot of focus away, making sure I had to do these, but we were still up for some points at the time so there was potential to still be in the top 10 until it went completely and it was no more.
“I was on for a definite P4 pretty much and hopefully fighting Ricciardo for P3. We tried everything we could but it was out of our control today.”
To make matter worse, Lando now faces a nervous wait to see if he’ll have to take a grid penalty for new engine components at the Portuguese GP in two weeks time.
