Why Sainz could have won F1's Australian GP even in a Verstappen head-to-head

“When I was about to catch the flight to come to Australia, I was still in bed,” reflected Carlos Sainz, on his recovery from appendicitis that ruled him out of the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix. “I could barely use my abdominal [muscles] to move. And I was like, this is not going to happen. But I took the flight, and suddenly when I landed in Australia, the feeling was a lot better…”

A little over two weeks after going under the knife in Jeddah, Sainz was busy trying not to be too disappointed about having missed out on pole position for the Australian Grand Prix. A couple of miniscule mistakes, allied to a turnaround in Max Verstappen’s pace as Red Bull initially struggled for performance at the Albert Park venue, proved to be the difference between the two positions on the front row.

Sainz felt that he needed to be at 100% to beat Verstappen, even if Ferrari’s long-run pace had proved favourable in Friday’s FP2 session, and questioned whether he would be able to realistically shake off any lingering effects from his operation to dice against the championship leader. As it turned out, the Spaniard was spared that encounter.

Like all things tend to do in contemporary F1, proceedings in Australia began with Verstappen sauntering into the lead. Sainz attempted to probe for potential passing points into the first few corners, but this wasn’t the Red Bull driver’s first rodeo. They, for a short time at least, settled into the order in which they had begun.

There was the added problem of tyre graining to consider, as Pirelli was bold and brought the three softest grades of rubber to Australia. A measure to improve strategic variance and limit the race from being a one-stopper, the softer tyres had offered much in the way of head-scratching throughout the weekend. The C5 soft, particularly the front tyre, tended to saturate under load and cause understeer; suggestions were that, were more sets of the medium C4 available, they might have served as a better qualifying tyre.

“I couldn't put Max under pressure into Turn 1,” Sainz reckoned, “and from there on it was a kind of a very strategic first lap and a half where you are wanting to protect the tyre from opening up the graining.” Reducing lateral sliding was the key to this.

Verstappen scampered into the lead at the start, but his problems were already becoming apparent

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

A change to F1’s DRS ruleset has at least given Verstappen a little extra in his first-lap workload to consider, as it can now be activated at the end of the first lap. This has given him the added task of building a lead of a full second on that opening lap.

Given the Red Bull’s obvious strengths, he has largely made light work of it. But not this time. Sainz crucially held on to the Dutchman’s coattails to sit on the cusp of getting his first dose of DRS – but there was more at play in Verstappen’s court, which became apparent as soon as the second lap.

On the run to Turn 3, Sainz and Verstappen were separated by the usual margin one would expect with a slipstream. The Spaniard was about half a tenth faster on the run to the corner, Verstappen reclaimed that back under braking, but the corner exit made the difference; the Red Bull shipped 0.6s to Sainz in just a few metres, with it uncharacteristically losing speed at the end of the straights. Verstappen’s right-rear brake caliper was stuck, and Sainz could smell blood.

Sainz kept going for another two laps before making his hard-tyre switch, coming back onto the field with a solid lead – albeit one nearly wiped out by a virtual safety car

“[It was] basically stuck on from when the lights went off,” Verstappen explained after his short-lived race. “The temperatures just kept on increasing until the point, of course, that it caught fire.”

First, fleeting wisps of smoke emerged from his RB20; next, those wisps metamorphosed into great plumes, their intensity growing as Verstappen’s pace fell. At the time Sainz caught him with DRS along Lakeside Drive and successfully reeled off his play for the lead, Verstappen was about 16mph shy.

Although the Ferrari was now ahead, Verstappen attempted to cling on. With DRS, the top-end speed arrears were more or less reversed, suggesting that the catching brake wasn’t sapping too much in outright straightline speed. But data traces do show that, when Verstappen was turning right on the following lap, he was shedding speed quite considerably.

The exit of Turn 7 and the high-speed Turn 10 were both accompanied by a drop in velocity relative to Sainz, only alleviated when the steering wheel was turned anti-clockwise. It ultimately proved moot as the temperatures were rising, and shards of carbon eventually sprayed out of the wheel hub like an emptied buckshot.

The Australian crowd roared as it became apparent Verstappen was out of the race. Nothing personal; the spectators simply wanted a different winner rather than another 10-victory streak from F1’s current pre-eminent force. Sainz now had the lead, with the chasing pack of Lando Norris, Charles Leclerc and Oscar Piastri in pursuit.

Plumes of smoke from Verstappen's Red Bull signalled his imminent retirement, leaving Sainz free to control the race from the front

Photo by: Andrew Ferraro / Motorsport Images

“I was confident about the first half of the race that I was going to be OK, because it's more or less the laps that I did on Friday,” Sainz reckoned. After all, Ferrari’s representative race pace in FP2 had looked pretty handy; Leclerc had been the faster of the two drivers over a stint on the medium tyres, factoring at the top of the average time order ahead of Norris’s McLaren. Aston Martin and Mercedes had been behind, so it had already been established that there was little threat.

Red Bull only had a stint from Sergio Perez to count on as Verstappen’s delayed start to second practice cost him a chance of a long run on Friday. The Mexican’s 12-lap stint was behind that of Aston and Mercedes; different fuel loads might apply here, but it was evident that he was not really making inroads into the top four drivers in race trim.

Sainz might not have been in touch with Leclerc during FP2, but the Madrid-born driver had certainly had his Weetabix on Saturday morning. The balance seemed to shift between the two; Sainz had a car that he could use to great effect in qualifying, while Leclerc appeared to be second-best – and the disparity in track position was another mitigating factor in the race.

If Leclerc was going to have a hope of beating Sainz, he’d have to get Norris out of the way first. The proliferation of higher-speed corners heightened McLaren’s performance over the likes of Aston Martin and Mercedes, putting both Norris and home hero Piastri well into the mix.

But Sainz dropped that trio with moderate ease, telling the team that he was intending to “open the gap and go long”. Leclerc, frustrated behind Norris, opted to stop at the end of the ninth lap and Piastri followed him, leaving the front two to go deeper into the race on their opening set of mediums.

When Norris stopped at the end of lap 14 for the hard tyre, this handed Leclerc and Piastri an undercut advantage and the Briton dropped to a net fourth place. Sainz kept going for another two laps before making his hard-tyre switch, coming back onto the field with a solid lead – albeit one nearly wiped out by a virtual safety car: Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes had given up the ghost at the end of that lap and crawled to a stop just after Turn 10.

Upon the lap 18 restart Sainz’s lead over Leclerc had briefly fallen to below a second, although this was restored as the ex-McLaren driver had more room to manoeuvre with his younger tyres. Thus, the delta between the two Ferraris grew by about half a second per lap, as Leclerc admitted that he had not done a particularly stellar job of managing his first set of hard tyres.

This left the Monegasque vulnerable to the advances of Norris. McLaren enacted a swap between its two drivers on lap 29 of 58 owing to Norris’s greater pace and Piastri agreed that it was the right call – even if it would deny him a home podium finish. Leclerc’s heavy-handedness with the first set of hard tyres gave Norris the impetus to close to within two seconds of the Ferrari, and it was at this point where parallel universes diverge.

Sainz never truly came under threat from Leclerc, who was at risk of being undercut by Norris ahead of their second stops

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

“On the lap we were going to undercut, he boxed,” Norris said of that fork in the road, when Leclerc stopped at the end of lap 34 for a second set of hards. “So you have to go off and do kind of a different strategy. We got close in the second stint; if I boxed, I think I would have undercut. But he boxed, so I missed that opportunity. You always think, what happens if we did it one lap earlier?”

This forced Norris into waiting until lap 40 to do his final stop. Had he gone at the same time as Leclerc, he’d have lost track position anyway, so holding on for six more laps at least offered a tyre offset – even if it contributed little in the remaining third of the race as Leclerc rather cracked the code of keeping the hards alive.

Sainz stopped on the following lap and returned to the circuit five seconds clear of Leclerc, a lead that he managed to keep relatively static until the final three laps. It was the race leader’s tyres that started falling away and this allowed Leclerc to shrink his team-mate's advantage, taking over a second out of it by the end of the penultimate lap.

"Life is a rollercoaster sometimes, but it can be good to you sometimes. Just letting it sink in and enjoying the moment"
Carlos Sainz

Sainz will have been delighted to see the signs of a virtual safety car on that final tour of the circuit, when George Russell hit the Turn 6 wall when trying to pass and avoid a slow-moving Fernando Alonso ahead of him. Race neutralised, Sainz had won his third grand prix – the second of those enshrined by Russell’s appearance in the wall.

“It's the whole start to the year in general, how the year started with the news of the non-renewal,” Sainz explained. “Then you get yourself fit. You get yourself ready for the start of the season, pushing flat out. And then you get to Bahrain.

“You do a good podium. You say, ‘OK, now the season is starting well and I can keep the momentum going’. And suddenly, boom, you're missing a race in Jeddah and the operation.

“Long days in bed, not knowing if I was going to be back in time. Obviously, a lot of unknowns. Am I going to be back fit? Am I going to be back feeling still good with the car? And then suddenly you come back and win. So, yes, what I said on the radio – life is a rollercoaster sometimes, but it can be good to you sometimes. Just letting it sink in and enjoying the moment.

“Obviously, the second half of the race was a bit of an unknown. But yeah, once I got up in front and I had a gap, you can manage everything. You can manage yourself, you can manage the tyres, you have less pressure. You can choose your places where to push and not to push you know, and everything becomes a lot easier.”

Victory for Sainz was a rich reward for his efforts to get back to fitness quickly following his operation

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

But here’s the real poser: could Sainz have won the grand prix had Verstappen stayed in it? Assuming the Dutchman retained a healthy car, there’s more than just anecdotal evidence to suggest that he wouldn’t have necessarily had it all his own way versus his former Toro Rosso team-mate. And that goes back to practice.

Verstappen’s aforementioned lack of a representative FP2 long-run was due to the lingering impacts of an FP1 kerb strike that knocked some of his Red Bull parts loose, but he made up for it with an eight-lap stint during FP3. Averaging his lap on the medium tyres for that stint, he looked strong with a 1m22.882s, versus Perez’s FP3 long-run on the same compound that yielded a 1m23.287s.

That’s a four-tenth gap, one that has been of a similar magnitude throughout their partnership at the Red Bull squad, so we can use that delta to estimate where Verstappen might have stacked up in the FP2 session against the Ferraris. Assuming Perez’s average time of 1m23.808s from FP2, Verstappen would likely have managed a 1m23.400s, or probably a couple of tenths better after the intermediate practice session.

This puts the Red Bull a smidgen behind the Aston Martins, but the AMR24 is still lacking in consistency to deliver Alonso a long-awaited 33rd win. With Red Bull’s Saturday progress, the green machines had dropped behind Red Bull, evinced in Perez’s eventual dispatchment of Alonso after a fierce battle during the middle stages of the race.

The lap times that Perez was running were also in the range of half a second to a full second off throughout the final phase of the race against Piastri, although Red Bull boss Christian Horner contended that Perez had “picked up a tear off underneath the floor and it's got lodged in an area that's caused significant load loss”. Perhaps that accounts for some of it, but it’s not unfair to say that the Guadalajara-born driver was not particularly on it during the Australia race.

Regardless, improving each of Perez’s laps by half a second up until the end-of-race VSC to synthesise a hypothetical Verstappen result puts him between Norris and Piastri. But would that have come to pass? Although Verstappen was encumbered by the braking difficulty early on, Sainz seemed to have a feeling in the remainder of his gut that the three-time champion was gettable without it.

“I knew this weekend and this race, I could have the pace to challenge Max,” the race winner revealed. “And I thought to myself, with how powerful the DRS is around here, if I get myself within the DRS range after lap one, we can put him a bit under pressure.”

Perez was more direct when asked if Sainz would have beaten Verstappen in a ‘normal’ Albert Park encounter. “Absolutely”, he replied, influenced by the level of pace of the Ferraris across the Australia weekend.

Perez's pace in the sole remaining Red Bull lends credence to the theory that Ferrari might have won even without Verstappen's problems

Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool

This speed allowed Leclerc to keep Norris at bay in that final phase; covering off the undercut ensured that Norris would have to do the deed for second on track. The gap never narrowed beyond the two-and-a-half second mark in that final stint, and thus Leclerc guaranteed Ferrari’s first 1-2 finish since Bahrain 2022.

“It's been a long time since we have had the genuine pace to have Red Bull... I wouldn't say under control, because we don't know what the real pace of Max today was,” Leclerc contended after the race. “But I will say that from FP1, we knew that pole position and the race win were possible because we had very good tyre degradation, very good pace, and that is a very encouraging sign.”

"I'm still without a job for next year. I guess this is going to help it!"
Carlos Sainz

Piastri secured a McLaren 3-4 after dropping away from Norris. Although the home crowd would have dearly loved to have seen its local hero flank the winner on the podium, his pace delta to Norris justified their earlier swap. At least the Australian was not challenged from behind.

Once Perez had cleared Alonso, there might have been some expectant faces on the McLaren pitwall that the ex-Racing Point driver might be able to find an easy way through. Instead, Perez could not really erode Piastri’s gap as the Australian worked on keeping it relatively static and ensured he would be the main beneficiary should any of the front three encounter misfortune.

It was a victory that came at the perfect time for Sainz. After losing his Ferrari drive for 2025 and then being ruled out of Jeddah, misfortune had started to build, and the Spaniard needed a positive to cancel them out and put himself in the shop window for next season: “For sure, it does no harm. That is 100%. But yeah, I'm still without a job for next year. I guess this is going to help it!”

Norris completed the podium in third as McLaren showed well at Albert Park's fast sweepers

Photo by: Glenn Dunbar / Motorsport Images