Lando Norris leaves Carlos Sainz shaken with terrifying Austin GP near miss
A panicked Carlos Sainz sounded shaken after a scary near-miss with friend Lando Norris during United States Grand Prix practice.
The session was less than 10 minutes old when they almost came together. The Ferrari driver was on a hot lap while Norris was driving his McLaren rather more sedately to get his tyres into their optimum window. But as Sainz came tearing through the COTA esses, his former team-mate failed to move too far off the racing line and the Spaniard had to bail out.
Drivers usually send angry messages after such incidents, but there was a not of worry in Sainz's voice as he reported the near-miss over the radio. "Oh my god, whoa," he said, before telling his team: "Lando there. I think he didn't see me, but we nearly crashed." Fortunately, Sainz was able to react in time to avoid hitting into the side of the McLaren.
He will hope to at least start this Sunday's race after missing out on the Qatar Grand Prix two weeks ago. His Ferrari suffered a significant fuel leak which could not be fixed in time for him to start the race, forcing him to watch the action from the garage.
"I've been trying to 'recover' from Qatar, not so much physically, because I didn't race, but mentally from not being able to take part in that race," he told reporters in Austin. "Which, in hindsight, actually, if there was a race to miss it was probably Qatar. Looking back it looked like a good one to maybe skip. But now in Austin, I'm ready to focus on what matters, at least trying to get hopefully back on the podium this weekend.
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"We've changed a lot of parts in the car to try to obviously correct the issue that affected us in Qatar. We are trying also to find solutions in the long-term, not only in the short-term, because it's definitely something that we are not happy [about] and we've also had issues in the past.
"So, it's a bit of a headache that is giving us this fuel tank [problem] now and then. But we will try and put it back together this weekend and, hopefully, there shouldn't be any issues anytime soon."
His Ferrari team has a 79-point lead over McLaren in the constructors' championship, but the gap is closing with the Woking-based outfit scoring highly in recent outings. As long as his team suffers no more reliability gremlins, Sainz is confident that his team can do enough to "keep them behind".
He added: "[That] doesn't mean that they are not going to beat us. I think they're going to beat us in most of the races from here to the end of the season if all things align, because they do have a very quick car nowadays and they look to be the only ones that can sometimes bother Red Bull, and in a track like Singapore, where maybe it's more us [who were quicker]."
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