In what was a hugely disappointing weekend for the Scuderia Toro Rosso team, Carlos Sainz Jr suffered an engine problem that meant that his race was ended prematurely after 44 laps.
From the start of the race, Sainz struggled with the car, but he and the team hoped that he would be able to push through them. Unfortunately, this was not the case, and roughly half way through the race, he received the call to pit and retire the car, meaning that Toro Rosso came away from the weekend completely empty handed, as his team-mate, Daniil Kvyat, came home in sixteenth place.
“We had an issue with the engine from the moment the race started – I felt it misfiring during the whole of the first ten laps, which meant I dropped from ninth to sixteenth,” commented the Spaniard, who had been running in a tight midfield battle. “We tried everything in order to get it working and for 15 laps I was playing with the switches trying to make the car work.
“Unfortunately, this didn’t happen, even though we managed to recover a bit of pace, and as the issues persisted, in the end, we had to retire the car. It’s disappointing and certainly not what we needed, especially because points looked possible today. All in all, a difficult end to what I’d describe as a good weekend – qualifying yesterday was good and I was running in the points before the problem started, so there are some positives to take.”
