Formula 1 Racing

Perez opens up on F1 2023 slump

Sergio Perez, Red Bull Racing RB19, Zhou Guanyu, Alfa Romeo C43

It feels like ages ago since Perez lived up to his once-valid ‘street race king’ moniker and won the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, cutting team-mate Max Verstappen’s lead to just six points as he vowed to take the 2023 title fight all the way.
His pole in the subsequent Miami Grand Prix, with Verstappen down in ninth on the grid, was a chance to underline those credentials, but as the Dutchman scythed through the field to demote Perez he struck a psychological hammer blow.

It heralded the start of an annus horribilis for Perez, who began struggling with the car from the next round in Barcelona and missed Q3 stunning five times in a row – qualifying just ninth in the Hungarian race that broke that streak – an unacceptable calamity in the field’s dominant car.

Despite a contract for 2024 pressure had started to pile high on the Mexican, and further ramped up when Daniel Ricciardo was brought back to replace Nyck de Vries in the sister AlphaTauri team, with a clear aim of testing him out for a potential Red Bull return down the line.
Perez’s breaking point was the Qatar Grand Prix during which he looked utterly lost and bereft of confidence and finished 10th, over 80 seconds behind Verstappen, who sealed the championship that Perez once coveted with six rounds to spare.
While the alarm bells had been ringing for a while, Perez was so shell-shocked that he headed to the team’s headquarters for three days of simulator work and brainstorming with his engineers on how to dig himself out of a hole that to him felt like the Mariana Trough.

When asked by Autosport in a limited roundtable interview why Perez waited until after Qatar to take action and demand a brainstorming session, he replied: “Because Qatar was really the worst weekend I remember in a while, probably my worst weekend ever in the sport.

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

Sergio Perez, Red Bull Racing RB19, Zhou Guanyu, Alfa Romeo C43

“It was such a bad weekend that I really felt like: ‘I cannot be this bad, there’s something that’s going on’.

“When you have these back-to-back races, I feel like sometimes there is not enough time to really go through it all. So, I felt like we really had to take a bit of time to make sure that we understood which way we were going.

“Obviously, we had a deficit within the car set-up that we were playing around [with] weekend by weekend and we were just not able to progress through it. 

“But once we managed to get on top of…

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