Giovinazzi finished his first race in twelfth, after qualifying sixteenth. The performance would have been impressive for any rookie, let alone one that only had an hour’s worth of running before qualifying. He described the weekend as “fantastic”.
“I’m happy with the performance I had,” he said. “It was a good qualifying. Today, we did a good race.
“There was no big mistake – just maybe the one in the first corner where I compromised a little bit my first stint with softs as I had a big flat spot.
“After the pit stop, the pace was quite good, so we finished the race P12. My target was to finish the race because the laps I did today were important for the feel of the car and the tyres.
“So I’m happy with the performance. I really enjoyed these two days.”
“There was no big mistake – just maybe the one in the first corner where I compromised a little bit my first stint with softs as I had a big flat spot.
“After the pit stop, the pace was quite good, so we finished the race P12. My target was to finish the race because the laps I did today were important for the feel of the car and the tyres.
“So I’m happy with the performance. I really enjoyed these two days.”
Giovinazzi had been attending the race as Ferrari’s third driver, his first GP in his new role, but that changed on the Saturday morning. Pascal Wehrlein had been running a limited training programme through the winter, after his accident at the Race of Champions. After the second free practice in Melbourne, Wehrlein felt he wasn’t fit enough to tackle the new, tougher cars for an entire race distance.
The late call to put Giovinazzi in the seat meant he only got onto the track in the new Sauber in FP3, giving him an hour’s running before qualifying, where he qualified just a fraction of a second slower than teammate Marcus Ericsson.
Though Giovinazzi did have some experience in an F1 car, having run in the Sauber during the first preseason test, Sauber’s Monisha Kaltenborn explained that the car is very different to the one he’d been driving at Barcelona.
“This is not the car we had at T1 (test one),” she told Sky Sports. “We changed a lot aero wise. It’s a very different feel. So he did a great job. Impressive.”
Impressive enough to be racing again in the near future. Apparently not, according to Kaltenborn. The team boss said any further running this season for Giovinazzi was not going to happen.
“We just had this arrangement in terms of replacement of a regular driver.”
That said, there’s now only two weeks until the next race at China and we won’t know until we get there if Wehrlein feels fit enough for the challenge of a whole GP.
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