Sainz immensely proud of pole in Mexico: 'This is not normal here!'

"Very sweet," said Sainz's first reaction to his pole position. "It's not normal to have such two strong laps around Mexico and there's a lot of sliding in the lap, very difficult to put a lap together, and actually my two laps of Q3 were almost both perfect."

Both Sainz's first and second laps were enough for pole position. "Very happy to be on pole and to confirm the good form from Austin," he said. "I had high hopes coming into Mexico and yeah, we've managed to keep it up," said the Spaniard.

Sainz put his free time to good use

The Ferrari's strength lies in the race, but a lot of speed also came out of the car during qualifying in Mexico. "Tyre preparation has been a hot topic in Ferrari the last few races because we feel like in the race we're always very strong, but we seem to lack something come qualifying."

Sainz has made good use of his time off and is now taking advantage of it. "This year's car is very good on tyres, but I think that sometimes it means that in quali you cannot maybe extract the maximum out of the tyres in the first timed lap on the Soft tyres. And yeah, I put a bit of focus on that during the break, the three-week break. came into Austin and Mexico with a couple of things that seemed to pay off," said the Ferrari driver.

This article has been created in collaboration with Matt Gretton