Carlos Sainz he finished the Malaysian Grand Prix in eleventh position, remaining at the doors of the points in a race in which his car exhibited the lack of pace required to break a streak that is already five races without scoring. However, his day could have been significantly worse had it not been for a quick maneuver into the starting grid.
When you arrive at your position on the grid, the sixteenth, Sainz told his team by radio that the engine of his Toro Rosso was off, so that the power of traffic lights was delayed. Finally, he managed to reactivate in extremis your power unit using the MGU-K with an adjustment in your steering wheel, thanks to the indication of its engineer, and the output is produced, reaching to gain four positions on the first lap.
The driver from madrid, however, has stated that had not expected that Charlie Whiting would give the green light to the output despite having reported that I could not boot, instead of providing another round of training, and considers only his quick reaction prevented that the output were to happen with your car stalling.
“Probably they were expecting me. I guess that was it, that they didn’t know whether to take a yellow flag or do another formation lap, but I do not understand as they did an output having a the car completely stopped when the lights began to light up. I was surprised that the race would have started.”
The Spanish rider admitted not know what was the exact cause of this sudden shutdown, although it ruled out that it was just a problem of your clutch, and explained the process by which it is achieved that the engine could become alive again:
“Typically, when you are heating the clutch, and what do you make of a somewhat aggressive, can you skip the anti-draft. This time it was not, so that was very surprising, but we managed to relight the engine with the only thing that we have on the steering wheel to do that. I knew it because we tried before this season, but when the engine is turned off, the only thing I can think of is: ‘oh shit, it is all over!’“.
“suddenly, my engineer reminded me quickly on the radio, but the first time we tried to turn on did not work. Thanks to God, the second time if happened just when you went on the five lights, and in that time, ‘voom’, I left when the lights went off”.
The strategy from Toro Rosso to carlos Sainz, once located in the eleventh position, was finish the race with a set of tires slightly used to try to finish in tenth place, but the one pit stop strategy of Jolyon Palmer gave more revenues, and allowed him to stay with the last point position:
“Definitely, his strategy worked. Also they were ahead in classification, so we were always going to have better race pace than us, especially with Kevin (Magnussen). Qualified with a used set of soft and we got three-tenths. In the last stint, had pneumatic tyres, new, e I did 16 laps in qualifying, but the tires were only a little faster. That we don’t like, not what we expected”.
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