Carlos Sainz Jr felt he did as much as he could to finish ninth during the Australian Grand Prix, but was frustrated not to at least match his seventh place grid slot during Sunday’s race at Albert Park.
The Scuderia Toro Rosso driver believes the team deserved to finish higher than ninth and tenth in Australia after showing good pace throughout the race, but ended up compromised by making the wrong tyre choice when the Grand Prix was suspended due to Fernando Alonso and Esteban Gutierrez colliding on track.
Sainz also survived a late-race clash with team-mate Max Verstappen at the penultimate corner to finish on the tail of the Williams of Valtteri Bottas.
“I’m not entirely happy with today’s result because I think we could’ve scored more points with the car we have, but I did everything I could to finish as high up as possible,” said Sainz.
“To finish in P9 is frustrating. The race was a bit of a chaos, so it was difficult to get it all right. After the red flag things got interesting and even though it’s not the easiest of tracks to overtake, I was able to do some good moves – some of them were quite tough!
“I did my race and I think we put on a good show. I enjoyed it out there but I think we deserved to end up higher up instead of going backwards after qualifying in P7 yesterday.”
