Scuderia Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz has been handed a ten-place grid penalty for Saturday night’s Las Vegas Grand Prix after hitting a loose manhole cover during practice on Friday for the race on the Las Vegas strip.
Free Practice 1 was abandoned while in the delayed free practice 2, Ferrari scored a 1-2 with Charles Leclerc being fastest while Carlos Sainz was second. Speaking following the action, Sainz commented saying:
An eventful day for us after the problem in FP1 with the manhole cover. Our guys however did an amazing job. They basically had to rebuild the entire car ahead of FP2 and thanks to them we managed to complete our programme in the second session, so a big thank you to all the mechanics.
We seem to be on the competitive side this weekend and I’m looking forward to tomorrow. On the negative side, we have been given a 10-place penalty for Sunday after the manhole cover damaged, amongst other things, my battery and we had to replace it. I honestly cannot understand it and I think an exemption to the rule should have been considered given what happened, but we’ll have to deal with it.
Charles Leclerc commented following the action saying:
It was a bit of a different day. With FP1 being stopped after just four laps, we didn’t get much mileage in, so we did our best to make up for it in FP2, with 90 minutes and 4 tyre compounds available to us. The session was productive, we put in a solid number of laps and I really enjoyed driving on this track.
For now, we look quite competitive, but there is still a long way to go. We have a limited amount of time left to prepare for tomorrow, so we will work hard to keep this momentum.