Sainz rues his misfortunate race-ending crash with Perez

Having displayed impressive speed in the second half of yesterday’s Azerbaijan Grand Prix, Carlos Sainz cut a disheartened figure when he assessed his high-speed crash with Red Bull’s Sergio Perez.

Having closed in on the leading trio in the dying stages of the 51-lap Baku race, Carlos Sainz was desperate to get onto the podium. With Sergio Perez having battled with Charles Leclerc for the second spot, Sainz managed to overtake the Mexican. However, just moments later, when the Spaniard tussled with his team-mate, Perez managed to fight back and pull alongside Sainz.

The Mexican and the Spaniard collected one another on the run down to Turn 3, with both smashing into the barrier and missing out on respective big points hauls.

The incident was investigated by the race stewards, but the they deemed the crash to be a racing incident, stating that neither Sainz nor Perez were predominantly at fault, and therefore they have taken no further action.

Elaborating on the high-speed crash with his Mexican rival, Sainz said that he did not feel that he was overly aggressive when exiting Turn 2.

“I was attacking Charles into Turn 2 and then I exited Turn 2. Checo [Perez] was on my left. We normally do a slight drift towards the left into the long straight, which I did like every other lap, and suddenly for some reason I don’t understand, Checo and I collided, which is unfortunate and also very disappointing.

“We’ve spoken already,” Sainz added. “[But] we need to analyse. I’m not someone who wants to put blame on either an excuse or put blame on another driver. It’s racing, everything happens super-fast.

“My feeling today is honestly I did nothing wrong, I didn’t do any erratic manoeuvre, put him against the wall or anything like that. We were just, like every other lap, drifting a bit, a tiny, tiny little bit towards the left because that’s where the racing line is and we just touched. It is what it is.”

“It’s a real shame, the important thing is that both Checo (Perez) and I are ok after the crash but it’s obviously frustrating. I stayed on the normal racing line and didn’t do anything strange, the same as every other lap, so I didn’t expect the contact on my rear tyre. It’s part of racing but it hurts and we lost a lot of points today.

“I was having a very good race and was very quick. I think P3 or even P2 would’ve been possible, but it is what it is. Time to turn the page and focus on Singapore,” concluded the Spaniard.