Sainz: Singapore a "big opportunity" missed

Sainz had qualified an excellent sixth and was still running seventh in the aftermath the accident. However loose bodywork led to the FIA telling him to pit to remove it, and coming in as early as lap seven ruined his strategy.

Later an MGU-K issue led to a loss of power, and he fell back to 14th.

"It was a big opportunity," Sainz told Motorsport.com. "When you have such a good car, a good race weekend, when everything is going perfectly, to lose everything on the race day is a big pain for us, because we were in line for a strong result.

"But we won't get down, and we will try to fight back."

Sainz says the accident was simply a result of everyone trying to get around the slow-starting Max Verstappen.

The Spaniard clipped Hulkenberg, who spun into the pit wall.

"Obviously Max had a bad start, and I lost momentum trying to avoid him. Then Fernando, Kvyat and everyone tried to go all together, and five side-by-side is difficult. We lost a couple of tenths of performance, but still even with that damage I was still pumped to recover.

"We got through the accident but we stopped so early, it was always going to condition our strategy and our race. But still, even after the early pit stop we managed to go through the traffic, we managed to have a good pace on the supersoft. Then we had to pit on lap 26 for the soft, and go to the end.

"But we lost the 'K' and we had to go on 600 horsepower for the rest of the race. That especially, even more that the start, was a bit of a disaster.

"I was still pumped, trying to go through the traffic, trying to do my race, but when the engine went, no fighting, you couldn't do anything else."

While the Toro Rosso chassis will be well suited to next race in Malaysia Sainz fears that lack of horsepower will be a problem, as it as at Spa and Monza.

"The problem will be the straight line deficit, those two long straights will clearly not be good for us. But we cannot let that put us down, we still need to be fighting like we were doing at the beginning of the year."