Leclerc’s best track is “one of the worst ones for me”, Sainz admits · RaceFans

Carlos Sainz Jnr admitted the Baku City Circuit is one of his weakest tracks after his team mate beat him to pole position at the circuit for the fourth year in a row.

Charles Leclerc was three-tenths of a second ahead of everyone in qualifying for the Azerbaijan Grand Prix. Sainz will start third, the pair split by Oscar Piastri’s McLaren.

Sainz said he was beginning to find more from his car as the qualifying session went on. “I managed to find a couple of things in Q3 that gave me a bit more pace than what I was showing in Q1 and Q2,” he said. “Probably found it a bit too late.

“By the time I found them, I wish I would have had more laps before to get used to driving the car a bit like that. I felt like I was more competitive.”

But he admitted Leclerc is usually strong in Baku. “It’s always been a track that I struggle a lot at. It’s the best track for Charles and one of the worst ones for me.

“I’m glad to be P3 and have a good position going into tomorrow, although it’s something that I keep working on around here because from FP1 I always tend to lack a bit of rhythm and I need to build it up.”

Although Sainz was reluctant to explain where he found his improvement in qualifying, “because I would be revealing a bit too much” he described it as “little things that you can do in quali to get the car to stop a bit better in the long braking zones.”

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“That gives you a bit more confidence to brake those three to five metres later that around here is fundamental,” he explained. “It’s interesting because I normally feel very comfortable in city tracks like Singapore or Monaco. But Baku has never been, in my 10 years in Formula 1, one of those.

“Every year I come back here trying to improve myself, trying to find more of an edge in my driving, but it just doesn’t come very natural to me.”

“It’s all about braking here in Baku and having the confidence to stop the car as late as possible, trusting that the car then is going to turn in into the corner,” Sainz added. “That’s where he excels around here and where he’s particularly comfortable from the beginning of FP1.

“From my side, I don’t know why I don’t have exactly that same feeling that I have in Singapore, maybe on the higher downforce, or in Monaco with higher downforce, but it’s what it is. I still think I made some good progress. I’m going into tomorrow into the top three. So, yeah, I still think we’re in the mix.”