Sergio Perez had been complaining about the RB20 and struggling to perform well for a while. Azerbaijan GP came at the right time for the Mexican driver, as he was in the hunt for the race win before his unfortunate crash. Perez has now revealed that Red Bull finally understands the problems he was pointing out, with engineers apologizing to him.
Christian Horner revealed how Red Bull has tracked the issue with their car back to the 2023 Spanish GP upgrades. Surprisingly, this was around the same time when Perez started struggling. The Red Bull team boss revealed that the team didn’t focus on the issue since Max Verstappen was performing well.
Perez says Red Bull #F1 engineers have apologised to him for not taking his feedback on the car more seriously until Verstappen was struggling too.
Should Perez’s warnings have been heeded sooner?
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As the team has now accepted their mistakes of not listening to his feedback, Perez revealed to The Race, “To be honest, after Monza some engineers came to me to sort of apologize, because now it’s much clearer what the problems were that I was talking about.”
Perez then detailed the unpredictable characteristics of the car. However, he stated that Red Bull is now taking steps in the right direction. He said, “We know what the problems are and we can drive around them. Before we didn’t know and it was just very difficult to drive the car. I’m happy that it seems like we’re going in the right direction.”
Perez was in a great position to win the Azerbaijan GP. However, McLaren asked Lando Norris to hold back the #11 driver allowing Piastri to come out ahead of him. Towards the end, Charles Leclerc fell off the pace and had Perez made the turn 1 move stick on Carlos Sainz, he would’ve been in contention to overtake Piastri for the win.
At the Singapore GP, Red Bull doesn’t expect to be on the same level of performance as Baku. The race at the Marina Bay Street circuit was the only race in the 2023 season to be won by a non-Red Bull car. The RB20 struggled with the bumps and kerbs at the Monaco GP, and Singapore won’t be a different story.
