Sergio Perez says his first stint loss eventually forced him to settle for a Top 3 position in F1 Chinese GP after a rather slower start.
The start and opening stint of F1 Chinese GP, set the tone for Red Bull’s Perez who had to settle for third at the end of it, not only losing to teammate Max Verstappen but also McLaren’s Lando Norris in the process after passing the Ferrari cars.
At the start, he lost to Aston Martin’s Fernando Alonso. It took him few laps to clear and he ran second for a while until the pit stops. The safety car periods left him behind Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc in the final stint which allowed Norris to stretch his lead.
Having passed Leclerc, it looked like Perez would challenge Norris for second but did not have enough gas in the tank and had to settle for third. The Mexican felt his opening stint set the tone in the grand prix as Top 3 was the maximum he could have attained.
He felt they took a step back from the sprint after changing the set-up. “I obviously was on the inside of Max and had to break earlier,” said Perez about Lap 1. “And Fernando was on the outside. My start wasn’t that good. So yeah, that meant that I lost the place to Fernando. And again, I had to fight quite hard to get by him.
“Probably used a little bit too much my tyres. And that put me definitely on the back foot for the first stint. So yeah, it wasn’t a straightforward race. But I also felt like we went in the opposite way with the changes we made from the Sprint event into the race. I felt like we probably took a little bit of backwards step.
“Regarding the last stint, at that point the gap was already quite big and given how good his pace was on first stint in terms of degradation I knew it was going to be close but once we basically had the same pace and once you go by the car ahead and you stop fighting for I don’t know how many laps we ended up fighting between Charles and myself, then it’s really game over.
“You use so much of your tyre. You put so much energy into them that they never really come back. It’s quite a high deg place and I paid the price, you know, but that was the only way I could get by Charles, because we were obviously at the same age tyres and he was really difficult to get by Charles,” summed up Perez.
The Mexican made the changes post sprint after not feeling 100% but it didn’t work. When asked, he explained the shortcomings. “I think I was just basically fighting in the pack,” he said.” Once you are in the pack it’s so hard to get a read from what the balance actually does.
“When you have two, three cars ahead of you, you have a lot less load in your car, so it’s really hard to know where your balance is at. It’s just a limitation that I had today. That probably is something we’ve got to review to see the directions we’ve taken, to see what we could have done better.”
Here’s Max Verstappen on less fun in China
Here’s how F1 Chinese GP panned out
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