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Sergio Perez’s disappointing Bahrain Grand Prix qualifying result, which has complicated his Red Bull Formula 1 debut, was a product of his own making.
Perez has not looked comfortable on performance runs at any point during his maiden grand prix weekend with his new team, having come to the season opener expecting to need a few races to get properly up to speed.
He complained after Friday practice that one-lap speed was not “coming naturally” and that translated into a surprise Q2 exit, while team-mate Max Verstappen scored pole position.
Perez had two attempts to make it into the top-10 shootout but his first lap was deleted for a track limits infringement at Turn 4 – and wouldn’t have been quick enough anyway – while his second lap he said was simply a case of him not doing a good enough job.
He stuck with medium tyres for his second run to avoid having to start on the softs, but missed out on a Q3 berth by less than half a tenth to his 2020 team-mate Lance Stroll.
“I was pretty confident that I had the pace in hand, just putting the lap together would get me through,” said Perez. “But I didn’t put it together.
“I think that was the right call from the team to try to go through on the mediums but I didn’t put the lap together.”
Perez described the Bahrain GP weekend as “difficult” overall, as he has struggled to balance the changing wind direction with his limited understanding of the car.
“It’s being confident and doing it lap after lap in these sort of conditions, I’m not there yet,” Perez admitted.
“Every session, I’m learning something and hopefully in the coming weeks, things will get better with that.”
Perez said he was “happy” with his progress and that he just needs to be “be patient, put the work in, and it should just be a matter of time – I’m not concerned at all”.
Missing out on Q3 was a very disappointing result for Perez, not just because it was well below what the car was capable of but because of the vital extra qualifying work it denied him.
He said he was “so disappointed” to have missed the opportunity to have two more new-tyre runs in Q3 in the same conditions as Verstappen – all because “I didn’t do the lap I should have done”.
Perez was less committed with his steering input through slow corners than Verstappen throughout their respective Q2 runs. Verstappen was more comfortably applying more lock, more quickly into the sharp corners of Turns 1, 8 and 10.
But after a near-identical sector one, the vital time losses came at the start of the second and third sectors.
Perez was more cautious through the Turns 6 and 7 sweeps and then ran slightly too deep into the Turn 8 hairpin.
He also had more understeer at Turn 13, the tricky, long right-hander that starts the final sector, and never troubled the apex in the way Verstappen did.
The rest of Perez’s lap actually looked quite good, which explains why his eventual Q2 deficit to Verstappen was just over three tenths despite – not huge, but enough to send one car into Q3 (and claim pole) and knock the other one out.
On softs in Q1 the difference was more pronounced in the first sector, as Verstappen’s more aggressive rotation into Turn 1 meant he was immediately up on Perez by a decent margin – and his sector one advantage was as big as sectors two and three combined.
The other, smaller trouble spots were the same: Turns 8, 10 and 13, where Perez was just lacking a bit more commitment on the initial steering, there was a delay rotating the rear, and just a hint of understeer that Verstappen didn’t encounter.
That visible hesitation tallies with Perez’s assertion that he doesn’t feel on top of the car. He is confident that will change and it needs to sooner rather than later.
Perez was brought in to replace Alex Albon as Red Bull felt he would offer better support to Verstappen. But Perez will need a mighty recovery drive from 11th on the grid to aid Verstappen’s victory bid given the two Mercedes drivers start right behind the pole-claiming Red Bull.
“That’s the target, to recover and minimise the damage,” said Perez.
“It’s a long race, it’s a long season ahead of us. We’ll have to try and minimise the damage tomorrow, and I need every single kilometre that I can get as well.
“There are still a lot of things that I will be learning [in the race].”
