Carlos Sainz Jnr thanked his McLaren team for fixing his car’s cooling problems by fitting a new power unit earlier than planned.
McLaren has run different cooling packages on its cars due to the cooling problems Sainz has experienced since the previous round at Silverstone. This slightly impaired the performance of Sainz’s car.However since a new Renault power unit was fitted to his car overnight at the Circuit de Catalunya, Sainz reported his car now feels much better.
“It was definitely a good change,” he said. “I’d like to thank the team and everyone involved in this decision because it wasn’t an easy decision to try and bring the power unit forward one race.
“We were planning to use it in Spa but in the end we decided to use it here because the other engine was giving us cooling issues but also a bit of performance issues.
“Because of that I think we did the right change. We did the right thing to put it here this weekend and since final practice honestly we picked up a fair bit of performance and reliability and the cooling problem is also now done. So I’m happy with a change and relieved to be honest because it’s given us a lot of headaches lately.”
“I didn’t like the engine that I had before that,” Sainz admitted. “Both in performance and reliability it was not giving us much.”
McLaren changed Sainz’s chassis prior to yesterday’s running in a bid to address his cooling problems, to no avail. After his new engine was fitted Sainz put his car seventh on the grid and was only 15 thousandths of a second away from beating Alexander Albon to sixth.
“I’m happier today,” said Sainz. “Not very happy with my last sector, I think I could have sneaked a bit more performance.
“I don’t know why, since Q1 I couldn’t improve on my last sector run. I was very happy in sector one and two, I was flying in sector one actually, but in sector three for some reason it never got quicker. But maybe we could have got Albon with a cleaner sector three. But seventh is still decent.”
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Jethro (@jethro)
15th August 2020, 18:32
It makes a lot of sense, this heatwave is somewhat unusual and can’t persist for the rest of the season. Save the ‘hot’ engine for a cool race.
Jere (@jerejj)
15th August 2020, 20:30
@jethro For Silverstone, yes, but not for Montmelo as it is regularly this warm in August.
ADUB SMALLBLOCK (@waptraveler)
15th August 2020, 20:39
Boy, I hope you are right that this heat wave can’t persist! It’s 2:40PM at my home, and 105 degrees F.
OOliver
15th August 2020, 19:03
Perhaps there is a small blockage in a bank of the engines water channels
Sensord4notbeingafanboi (@peartree)
16th August 2020, 9:16
this has always been one of his best tracks. he is sly.