F1 Insider Blames Red Bull For Sergio Perez Performance Outlining One-Sided Strategy
F1 reporter and former strategist Bernie Collins claims Red Bull is partly to blame for Sergio Perez's 2023 season struggles.
The Mexican driver has failed to get into Q3 of qualifying in the last five race weekends leading Max Verstappen to now have a 99-point lead on his teammate in the drivers' standings.
During an appearance on the Sky Sports F1 podcast, Collins highlighted the part the Red Bull team has played in some of Perez's issues.
Perez qualified in sixteenth position for the British Grand Prix. As Q1 was set to resume after a red flag, Perez was first out on track. He got himself out of the elimination zone to provisional pole quickly, but then quickly got pushed back down to exit the session. Part of the problem was that he was sat at the end of the pit lane waiting for the green flag for nine minutes, all the while losing heat in his tyres.
Collins argued that the team should have been there to give Perez the best chance of getting through to Q2. She explained:
“There’s too much to do in the race starting from not getting out of Q1, that’s guaranteed.
“It’s easy for us outside to say that Checo [Sergio Perez] has not made it out of Q1 for five weeks in a row or whatever it is. It’s easy to look at that and say ‘Why is that happening, is he not performing as a driver?’
“This week, from what I could see, there’s a discrepancy between the strategy team and the driver.
“So if you have a driver that has struggled to get out of Q1, disregarding the fact that the car is by far the fastest car on track so it should be easy to get out of Q1, you’ve got to give them the best possible chance of doing that. And that fundamentally, is being the last car on track in those conditions."
The former Aston Martin chief strategist continued:
“I think he queued at the end of the pit lane for a long time as well. So there’s a few things that go together that say he should, partially through his driving because the car is the fastest car that’s out there, but partially through the position on track, it should be much easier to progress through Q1.
“So yes, he is leaving himself a lot of work to do. I think historically Checo has not been the best qualifier, he has been more suited to race, making the tyres work, managing whatever strategy is done. So there’s a combination of things that need to come now. There have been races, Monaco was clearly the shunt not getting through, but there have been races since that haven’t been so clear cut.
“And all of that needs to come together. We don’t know where the communication has broken down there, we don’t know what was going on in Silverstone Q1. But you need to be, with the fastest car, as a team you need to be progressing through Q1 every week. Teams sometimes get wrapped up in saving sets for Q3 but your first priority is to go through Q1.”
Looking ahead to Hungarian Grand Prix at the end of this week, Collins added:
“Hungary is much, much more difficult to overtake so you need to go through Q1 and that needs to be the priority in qualifying and worry about the Q3 position at a another point because it’s a shocking statistic to have not gone through Q1 so much in what is clearly the fastest car on track."