Carlos Sainz says he was made a passenger in his heavy crash during practice for the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix as the current generation of Formula 1 cars snap away so quickly.
The Ferrari driver was entering the high-speed Turn 3 early in FP2 when the car appeared to be unsettled by a bump and he spun through 360 degrees before hitting the barrier hard on the outside of the track. The session was red-flagged for over 20 minutes as a result of the clean-up operation, and Sainz says the way the uneven track surface caused him to lose performance meant there was no time to regain control.
“For some reason there’s been a change in the track compared to other years,” Sainz said. “There’s two bumps — one at the exit of Turn 2 and one at the entry of Turn 3 — that with this generation of car is upsetting it a lot. It nearly caught me out in FP1 and I changed a few things in the setup and in the line trying to get rid of it and then for some reason again on that lap it surprised me.
“It must have been an angle or exactly the way I took the bump and it made me be a passenger from there on. We’ve seen before with this generation of cars that any of these small bumps can really make you spin or make you have a pretty heavy crash. It’s not ideal but it is what it is. We’ll try and make it better for tomorrow.”