Helmut Marko reveals that Sergio Perez crashing his car on Friday has left the entire Red Bull team worried about damage ahead of the race.
The Mexican driver spun at turn 16 during the first practice session on Friday. He lost the rear of his car and hit it against the barriers during the opening stages of the session. This happened moments after Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc did the same thing. However, Checo’s incident happened at a slightly higher speed.
It took a lot of time for the Red Bull mechanics to repair the cars and send Sergio Perez out on track again. He performed decently for the rest of the session but his team is very concerned with the state of his RB16B.
Red Bull advisor Helmut Marko said earlier that the car is not in the best shape. “Unfortunately the bottom of the car is very damaged,” Marko said.
“The rear wing is also completely broken. That is of course a handicap because we have three races in a row and we have almost no spare parts left.”
Not the return to Mexico that Charles and Checo would’ve hoped for 💥
They both recovered to set times in the top 10 in FP1 👏#MexicoGP 🇲🇽 #F1 pic.twitter.com/UTrW7IzPET
— Formula 1 (@F1) November 5, 2021
Helmut Marko expects the lap times in Mexico City to improve
Drivers found very little grip due to excess dust on track at the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez on Friday. A lot of cars spun during the course of the two practice sessions. Marko however, expects conditions to improve as the weekend progresses.
“There’s a lot of dust because there’s hardly any racing here,” the Austrian explained. “That means there will be a considerable improvement in terms of lap time.
“However, we took that into account and that’s why we started on Hard tires on Friday. We think that the degradation and tire wear will be very low.” he concluded.
