Perez “caught napping” when Colapinto passed him at start

Red Bull team principal Christian Horner admitted he was surprised Sergio Perez failed to react immediately to the lights changing at the start of today’s sprint race, leading to him being passed by a rival.

Perez and Franco Colapinto started the sprint race from the pit lane after their teams altered their cars’ set-ups under parc ferme conditions. The Red Bull lined up ahead of the Williams at the pit exit but when the control light turned green Perez did not move initially.

Colapinto drew alongside him and immediately accelerated past the Red Bull driver. The Williams finished ahead of him.

Horner was puzzled by what he saw. “I need to have a chat with him about it because it just looked like he was caught napping a little bit and obviously Colapinto got the jump on him,” he told the official F1 channel.

As Perez was eliminated in the first round of qualifying yesterday, Red Bull opted to use the race as a practice session. As well as changing the set-up on his car the team brought him in during the race to change front wings.

“We managed to get some useful data from Checo in that race,” said Horner. “We managed to change the nose as well so we got some good feedback that hopefully we can use for this afternoon.”

“Basically, on a day that we weren’t going to score points with him, it was better to get as much knowledge as we could,” he explained. “So that’s what we’ve done, we’ve got some data now to look at between now and the next session, so hopefully we can make good use of it.”

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Perez said he did not want to run close behind other cars to ensure he had clean air in order to gather useful data about his car’s aerodynamic performance.

“The main objective of today was to be as further back as possible, to have as much clean air as possible,” he said. “That was the objective.

“I think we managed to understand the car with the changes we’ve done. I think there is some room to improve what we have to do going forwards. We we have to try and bring a little bit more balance to the car.”