The neon-lit grandeur of the Las Vegas Strip offered no solace to Sergio Perez, as his struggles in the Red Bull RB20 reached a grim new low during qualifying for the Las Vegas Grand Prix.
For the third race in succession, Perez was left stranded in Q1, an ominous sign of the Mexican driver's spiraling form this season.
The beleaguered Red Bull driver was knocked down to P16 in the final minute of the segment, which marked yet another bitter chapter in what he described as an ongoing battle with a "fundamental issue" plaguing his car.
“I think we’ve got a fundamental issue at the moment with the car that is just not working for me,” he lamented, a hint of resignation in his tone.
While his teammate Max Verstappen muscled the same machinery to fifth on the grid, Perez was left languishing, locked in what he described as a cycle of fruitless trial and error.
“At the moment, we come to the weekends and we just explore a lot of things, and yeah, it’s just a difficult one to make it work,” he explained.
The gap between Red Bull's drivers has been a glaring Achilles' heel this season, but Perez’s latest misstep magnifies the issue.
“It’s obviously not ideal,” he acknowledged. “You want to be up there, especially I know what I can do. But when you don’t have that grip underneath you, then it’s really hard, and you’re prone to a lot of mistakes and so on.”
Las Vegas qualifying was meant to be an opportunity for Perez to reset. Instead, strategic missteps compounded his woes, leaving him ruing his approach to the session.
“We’ve been lacking a lot of pace through the qualifying, and that’s been the main issue really for us,” he admitted, pinpointing a critical error in tyre management.
“So it didn’t get any better, and in hindsight, we should have used two sets [of Soft tyres], given that we were not so competitive in Q1. The main struggle is really that low speed with the tyres; it’s where the main struggle comes from,” he explained.
Adding to Red Bull’s woes is the absence of a low-drag rear wing, which hampered straight-line performance at the high-speed circuit.
While Verstappen managed to mitigate its impact, Perez appeared far less able to adapt, leaving his race strategy in tatters before it even began.
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Despite the grim outlook, Perez maintained a glimmer of optimism for race day, pointing to Red Bull’s stronger race pace observed during practice sessions.
“I think tomorrow is going to be a very tricky one,” he said, acknowledging the mountain he must climb from the lower tier of the grid.
“Yeah, there’s a long race ahead, a lot of things will happen, and I believe we will be more competitive come race day.
“[Thursday] we looked a lot better over the long race than over a single lap,” he concluded, holding out hope for a reversal of fortunes.
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