Carlos Sainz had the indignity of suffering the first engine failure of the 2019 Formula 1 season when the Renault power unit bolted to his McLaren went up in smoke and forced the Spaniard to park the smoking car at the entrance of the pits during the Australian Grand Prix.
Quizzed by reporters about the incident, Sainz confirmed that his car will have new MGU-K for the race weekend in Bahrain and hoped the cause was identified.
"Hopefully they have been looking at it for the past few days and they have found out," he said during a media briefing at Sakhir. "Hopefully, they find the cause of the issue so we can put some solutions in place for this race."
"If they work or not we will wait and see, but it is true we have had a couple of failures during testing so it is a weak point of the car and we need to keep working on it to make sure we don't throw any more points because we threw a couple of them away in Australia."
Despite a disappointing debut weekend in orange for the Spaniard he remains upbeat, "I think the car has no weaknesses apart from the basic ones, compared to the top teams. The power unit is strong in a straight line and we've done our steps forward, so I welcome that, but Lap 11 of race one is not good enough."
Sainz qualified 18th for the race in Melbourne, tripping up in traffic during his hot lap, while rookie teammate Lando Norris did an impressive job to claim 8th in his first F1 qualifying.
After parking his smoking Renault, Sainz said, "This one hurts, but this is Formula 1. My season has started with a really unlucky weekend but hopefully we can start having more positive results from Bahrain onwards."
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