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Carlos Sainz has spoken at length about the issues he had with the McLaren MCL34 during qualifying for the Spanish Grand Prix. He believes that his 13th place was the best he could do with the car as the team struggle to find the right balance.
Also to further the disappointment, for the first time at his home Grand Prix, Sainz was out-qualified by his teammate, as Lando Norris managed to qualify in 11th place
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The Spaniard says that the MCL34 seemed on target to make it to Q3 at the start of Q1 but as temperatures rose and the track rubbered in, the McLaren could not make the gains that the other teams were seeing.
Sainz also admitted making an error in his best lap but said that he was pushing hard and the time "was not very fast" and he just made a mistake from trying a bit too hard.
"Today wasn’t our day but tomorrow is a different day, tomorrow the pace will be different, the track will be different so maybe we can find a bit more rhythm than what we had today."
When asked if getting into Q3 was possible he replied: "No, I don’t think so. In Q1 I agree, (it looked like) Q3 was in our reach, as Q2 evolved we just didn’t find lap time compared to Q1. When your competitors suddenly find 3 tenths, 4 tenths, we couldn’t do that.
"We need to find why the harmony with the car wasn’t as good as yesterday, we have something to analyse there then we can get better."
When he was asked if the performance of the car was disappointing he answered: "Yes, definitely, after a strong P2 yesterday, today in practice we couldn’t find the right balance, we were struggling a bit.
"Q1 was encouraging, we were quite fast, then as the track temperatures were going up we were starting to lose quite a lot of rear grip and for reasons, we still don’t understand we didn’t improve in Q2 as much as we would have like.
"Not at harmony with the car, same as I had yesterday, we have things to analyse and look forward to tomorrow."
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