Sergio Perez says he learned a lot in his first race weekend for Red Bull, especially about the driving style of teammate Max Verstappen and the way to drive a Red Bull RB16B to get the most out of it.
In the first weekend of the season in Bahrain, Perez failed to advance to Q3 on medium tyres, unlike Verstappen, two Mercedes drivers and Gasly in AlphaTauri, and in the warm-up lap his car shut down and forced him to start from the pitlane.
The Mexican kept his composure and fought back to fifth place in his first race for Red Bull, and on the eve of the second race of the season in Imola he is determined to be better in qualifying because he is aware that it is very difficult to overtake on that track.
“I learned a lot,” said Perez.
“I learned more about Max’s driving style and how the car has to be driven to extract the maximum from it. I think that was the biggest learning, I know what balance I need from the car throughout the weekend.”
“I think it’s going to be very tight with Mercedes and we’re going to see if the fight is circuit related. It will be interesting to see how we are in Imola, on a very different track to Bahrain, and see how we compare against them.”
Perez also commented on the situation at the beginning of the first race when his car shut down in the warm-up lap and admitted that he had no idea what was happening.
“I had no clue what was going on but I stayed calm,” he said.
“Everything just shut down, the radio, the telemetry, everything was fully off and for a moment I couldn’t do anything. I was about to get out of the car and then that second, we managed to turn the car back on.”
“In the end I think we were very lucky I stayed in the car and we managed to get going again, even though we had to start the race from the pit lane.”
“My goal is to have a good race and I’m looking forward to the weekend. Hopefully in Imola we can come back and be in contention to fight for a podium and hopefully the win. Unlike Bahrain, qualifying is very important at Imola as you can hardly overtake there but I like it.”
