Carlos Sainz Jr. has the perfect description for his F1 Sprint Saturday at the Austrian GP

Initially of Saturday’s Dash Shootout on the Austrian Grand Prix, it regarded as if Ferrari was in for one more lengthy afternoon.

Whereas Charles Leclerc was struggling the moist situations throughout SQ1, issues had been even worse for teammate Carlos Sainz Jr. The Ferrari driver radioed into his workforce proper initially of SQ1 that he had an issue along with his brakes.

And he lingered on the observe, ready for a response.

Ultimately Sainz returned to the storage,

He would have sufficient time for one push lap in SQ1 simply to advance to SQ2, and he managed to make it by way of, ultimately qualifying fifth for the Dash race itself. As soon as the race started, Sainz was much more dialed in, ultimately coming throughout the road third behind the Pink Bull duo of Max Verstappen and Sergio Pérez, for his first podium of the 2023 marketing campaign.

Given how his day began, how did Sainz describe his first podium? Completely.

“Yeah, clearly completely satisfied to be right here, third, particularly given how the day began, that I couldn’t even do the laps firstly of Q1, that I needed to do a little bit of a loopy lap on the finish of Q1 to go although solely on one push-lap in combined situations,” stated Sainz within the post-race press conferences.

The Ferrari driver famous that he has been snug within the automobile all weekend, and that’s backed up by the outcomes up to now. Not solely has he secured his first podium of the season with the Dash race consequence, he’s in good place to problem for his second on Sunday, having certified third for the Grand Prix.

“And since then, actually I’ve felt actually snug within the automobile. Additionally did a few good laps in Q3 on used tyres, on Medium tyres,” added Sainz. “As we speak simply flowed properly by way of the Dash, did a good begin after which stored my tempo, adopted Checo, was making an attempt some laps to get nearer however like at all times, the soiled air and the graining with the Inters, didn’t enable me to place any extra stress than what I did – however not less than the tempo was good and I had an excellent day.”

Ferrari introduced some upgrades to Austria for the SF-23, and now that Sainz has had a while with the upgrades, he feels significantly better about the place the workforce is, and the place the automobile is.

“I don’t know the way it will likely be tomorrow with the degradation, with the tempo,” stated Sainz on Saturday. “I hope the automobile feels nearly as good because it’s felt in Qualifying, which might imply it will be a superb race to attempt to end within the podium with two automobiles tomorrow.”

“I felt snug all weekend. I did, as I stated, some actually good laps this morning and this put me on an excellent mind-set and superb feeling with a automobile right now after making some progress from yesterday,” added Sainz.

“Truthfully, I believe this yr I’ve been fairly near what the automobile is able to doing,” continued the Ferrari driver. “I do know there’s been plenty of P5s, and plenty of jokes going round that I can solely end P5 for therefore many consecutive races, however I actually consider there’s not way more we want this yr within the first few races however I hope tomorrow there’s greater than a P5 on the playing cards and I also can maximise it and get the second prime three on the primary correct prime three of the season.”