Sergio Perez wants Red Bull to change how it runs their car in upcoming races so he can improve his performance.
He began his second season at the team strongly, scoring his first career pole position at the Jeddah Corniche Circuit and winning the Monaco Grand Prix. However while team mate Max Verstappen has improved his performance and comfort in the car as the season has gone on, Perez has increasingly fallen back.
“Certainly the car has become quicker from the beginning of the season,” he said after yesterday’s race. “But certainly I’m not as comfortable as I was in the beginning of the season.”
Perez qualified almost eight-tenths of a second slower than Verstappen at Spa. Although his team mate was relegated to 14th on the grid by engine penalties, Perez was unable to beat him home after starting second, and finished 17.8 seconds adrift from Verstappen, who scored a dominant win.
Speaking after the race, Perez admitted his comfort in the car is “something that I need to work on, on my side, to make sure we are able to get the maximum out of the car.
“Sometimes… things become more natural for you to get the most out of your car. Sometimes you have to work really hard and go very deep in the analysis, to make sure you are able to extract the maximum. So, it seems that we are in that window at the moment.”
He believes the key to improving his comfort in the car is to change how the team sets it up at future races. “I really hope that from this weekend, we run the cars slightly different, so we are able to spot some differences that can come bring some performance on our side.”
However Red Bull team principal Christian Horner believes the difference in performance between his drivers last weekend was because “Max was quite simply in a league of his own.”
“He’s excelled here in the past and today he’s basically smashed it out of the park,” said Horner after yesterday’s race.
“He did a lap on medium [tyres] that still stood as the fastest lap, despite Charles [Leclerc] having a go at the end on a set of softs. He qualified on pole on two sets of soft tyres throughout the whole of qualifying and didn’t even do the last run. So it’s been a huge performance by him this weekend.”
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2022 Belgian Grand Prix
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