“I Think He Was Caught Napping”: Christian Horner on Sergio Perez’s Slow Pit Lane Start in Qatar Sprint

It’s becoming a recurring theme: Red Bull’s frustrations with Sergio Perez continue to mount. The Mexican driver endured an embarrassing moment just before the Qatar GP Sprint when Williams’ Franco Colapinto overtook him in the pit lane.

After the race, where Perez finished last, Christian Horner weighed in on the incident. “I need to have a chat with him about it because it just looked like…I think he was caught napping a little bit,” the Red Bull Team Principal said to F1TV.

Perez has struggled throughout most of the 2024 season to deliver consistent results. However, losing the place to Colapinto is likely to be deemed unacceptable by Red Bull, as it highlighted his sluggish reactions. Horner did not have much more to add to his comments, presumably because he was in disbelief—like most watching on were.

Sergio Perez is the first driver ever to be overtaken exiting the pitlane from which they started a race.

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— XquaHD (@XquaHD) November 30, 2024

Perez’s Friday was equally dismal, as he was eliminated in SQ1. In response, Red Bull opted to fit a new rear wing to his car and have him start from the pit lane. They treated his 19 laps around Lusail in the Sprint as a ‘test session,’ hoping to gather data to improve the car’s balance ahead of qualifying later in the day.

Overall, however, Red Bull doesn’t have much to fight for this season. Max Verstappen secured his fourth World Championship last weekend in Las Vegas, and the team is locked into P3 in the Constructors’ standings. Any insights gained to better the RB20 will likely contribute to the development of next year’s car—the RB21. That seems to be the Milton-Keynes-based team’s primary focus for the final two race weekends of 2024.