by VALERIO BARRETTA
Sprint Austria, Ferrari fourth force
The short race at the Red Bull Ring confirmed what emerged yesterday: the Ferrari it doesn’t have the pace to stay with Red Bull and McLaren, and at the moment it plays the role of third force with Mercedes. The Scuderia di Maranello, in the just finished Sprint, finished in fifth place with Carlos Sainz and seventh with Charles Leclercbeaten respectively by George Russell and Lewis Hamilton.
Brake problems on the SF-24 forced pilots into a prolonged lift and coast: Sainz also paid the price, arriving at the fight against Russell a little dull. Here is his post-Sprint comment.
Sainz’s words
“I had the same problems with the brakes. Especially the first part of the race was very hot and I had to lift my foot on the straight to cool the brakes. It’s a problem that we already saw in FP1, now we’ll try to solve it for tomorrow. We are at altitude, there is a lot of wake, take the DRS and they get very hot. It’s something to work on“, these are his words to Sky Sport F1.
“When I lost Piastri’s DRS for the brakes, you could see that the Mercedes had a little more today, it’s about a tenth. Russell passed me and from then on I tried to stay with him, but they had something more. I still kept Hamilton behind, which wasn’t easy“.
