Ted Kravitz slammed the ‘outrageous’ sequence of events that led to a marketing sticker causing a red flag during qualifying at the Qatar Grand Prix. The plastic culprit became attached to Carlos Sainz’s Williams car in the pit lane and was then dragged out onto the circuit.
Sainz had progressed to Q3 after another strong qualifying performance and was preparing for his penultimate flying lap when he noticed a layer of plastic around one of his Pirelli tyres. Onboard footage showed the Spaniard slipping around under the low-grip conditions before the long sticker became detached from the car.
After coming to rest on the circuit, race control was forced to throw the red flag, but for Sainz, damage was already done. He went on to qualify seventh, one spot behind Racing Bulls’ Isack Hadjar but ahead of Fernando Alonso.
Discussing the incident during the Sky Sports F1 broadcast, Kravitz ranted: “That’s outrageous. I’ve never known that. I’ve watched from the pit lane as these garages get more and more bedecked with stickers for marketing purposes and just being a bit whizz and wazz and wahey.
“But I never thought that one might get wrapped around a car’s tyres and affect that guy’s qualifying as it might have done, and attract an unsafe release charge from the FIA, so maybe we’ll just go back to good old-fashioned garage floors.”
Co-commentator Martin Brundle then chimed in with some additional insight. “But Ted, I think that piece of tape damaged the sidepod of the Williams,” he added. “They were busy putting some more tape on the sidepod. I think, as that was whistling around, it looks like they’ve had to… it might be worth checking out Carlos Sainz’s car…”
After the session, Sainz chatted with the media and addressed the freak incident, which fortunately did not impair his ability to extract a strong qualifying result for his Williams squad.
“I don’t know,” he replied when asked if the incident caused him to lose time. “I think we picked up the plastic leaving the pits, and the tyres got the whole plastic, and I spent four or five corners trying to get rid of the plastic.
“I think that plastic damaged the bodywork. The team managed to repair it by just putting another plastic on top, basically. I don’t know whether we were downforce down or not; they will let me know now in the debrief how much it really impacted us, but for sure, it’s not ideal to start Q3 with an issue like that.
“It puts you under pressure and a bit in chaos everywhere. But we managed to recover well. We managed to hit the [one minute] 20.2, which was my Q2 lap time, which probably was not much in it more than that.”