Checo Pérez believes that he could have fought for pole if his Red Bull had not had electronic failures
Limited by a car that had electrical issues from Q1 and didn’t give reference information, even the DRS failed, Sergio Čech Perez he said he was upset because he had to rate “pure feeling” for Mexico City Grand Prixwhere he wanted to be perfect and in the end he could only get to fourth place.
“(Annoyingly) boring, because it’s a qualifier where I wanted everything to be perfect. We had an electrical problem; I practically went through qualifying completely blind: I had no information about DRS, brake balance, timing,” he explained. Czech Perez from Red bull in the mix zone after the qualifications.
The number 11 car broke down at the start of Q1 and they had to change the electrical box. This delayed his going to the track from the start, but when he was on it he had no telemetry and even the DRS didn’t work.
Qualifying in Q1 and Q2 was practically “in extremis”, at the last moment. Currently, the pilot has real-time references to the lap he completed, along with other relevant data such as brake balance.
“When I look back, I was almost left out in Q1, I was almost left out in Q2, the DRS didn’t work in the initial moments of qualifying, it was a disaster in that sense. I hope we can solve it tomorrow,” emphasized Checo Perez. “P4 is not the worst, but I expected to be higher… tomorrow I just want to win, do it in the best way”.
Q2 was a critical moment, because a minute after the checkered flag fell, he was in 12th position, in the elimination zone, but managed to get closer to 63 thousandths of his teammate’s time, Max Verstappenwho eventually took pole position.
“When we see how close we were to pole, I think we could have fought a lot harder for it,” he added.
It seems that the problems were stronger in Sector 2, but also in Sector 1 where the direction, plus the changing track conditions affected everyone equally. “I had everything (I had no mechanical or aerodynamic problems), the problem is that I didn’t have a reference, we always have a delta (reference time) that we follow, but I didn’t have that reference, I went practically blind to pure feeling, sometimes we are so used to telemetry that I needed”.
Czech Perez he didn’t say surprised by the big step from Mercedes in Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez and commented that he has to make a big start on Sunday
“Yes, we expected that Mercedes strong here, but we will try to make a great start and fight from the start,” he said Czech Perez.