The race was delayed, which could have been why there were a lot of crashes on the first lap. Perez said that cold tyres were part of the issue too. He ended up going across some grass and gravel at Turn 1 when trying to avoid the crash that involved Pierre Gasly, Carlos Sainz, and Fernando Alonso.
The Mexican driver started the race from the pitlane because of brake balance issues. He ended up getting fifth place overall.
He later explained that he had to avoid Gasly during the final restart and he couldn’t see what was going on in Turn 1 due to lack of visibility. He believes that racing with these conditions could be really dangerous and one day, it might end up causing a big accident.
Sergio Perez from Red Bull Racing RB19 was in a race but he couldn’t really see anything for the last 30 laps. His strategy of starting on the hard tires had to change because there was an early red flag that changed the rules for everyone else too. This made him have to balance his risks and rewards as he tried to get ahead in the race.
At first, there was a problem with the DRS train which meant I had to take more risks than usual in order to make it further. It was risky but if I didn’t take the risks then I might not have finished the race or achieved a good rank.
Using the hard tyres was like a gamble as we weren’t sure what would happen and this put us out of sync. The safety car also made everything harder for us.
When asked if a 5th place ranking was good damage control, they said: “We did our best today. We needed to take more risks if we wanted better results.
The re-start at the beginning was chaotic and risky too for me.
On the bright side, at least the car’s issues got fixed for the race!”.
Red Bull team boss Christian Horner said that they had changed a few parts on the car which may have caused an issue during qualifying. He confirmed that the problem was solved and there were no repeats of it, so this was good news.
He did not have a good practice session, and then out on the track he was being too aggressive. He was brake-slamming into the third turn late. All the things were not perfect together, but that’s how it usually is with these cars.
Horner was asked to explain a braking balance problem. He replied that it’s something they can control in the car and he thinks the engine had some running during P3, but nothing abnormal happened during qualifying.