Sergio Perez endured another difficult race for Red Bull in Austria after sidepod damage sustained in first-lap contact with Oscar Piastri hampering his progress. The pair went side-by-side and made contact at Turn 4 on the first lap, with Perez edging the Australian wide.
After that he found the RB20 difficult to drive, reporting issues with understeer and traction. He also picked up a penalty for pitlane speeding.
He eventually finished seventh after a spectacular late duel with Nico Hulkenberg. The Haas driver ran wide at the final corner at the start of the last lap and then initially lost out to Perez at Turn 3, before dragging back past again.
“There was a lot of damage on the sidepod,” said Perez when asked by this writer about his race.
“I think I touched a bit with the Piastri into Turn 4. I don’t know if it comes from there. It was unfortunate because we had a good start.
“But from then on, the car was just nowhere, on a knife-edge and nothing I could do.
“I was just off-balance, I think also with making the mistake on the way into the pit lane with the pit limiter.
“It was just a disaster of a race that started really well. But I think with just lacking so much pace out there and sliding around, there was no hope for fighting people ahead.”
Perez: Early damage prevented recovery
He added: “It was all over the place. We tried to fix it with the diff here and there, and it was just nowhere.”
Perez said he ultimately lost out to Hulkenberg because he didn’t have enough momentum out of Turn 3, having passed the German.
“I think he did a mistake into the final corner,” he said. “I couldn’t get him. I couldn’t get any traction out of Turn 3. He was quite tough towards the end of the race, but he did a mistake. I went for it, but I couldn’t get any traction.”
Perez hopes that lessons can be learned from the Austrian weekend.
“I think there are a few things that we’ve got to look back at and carefully look at everything,” he said. “In qualifying, the main thing was it took me too long, I guess, to dial into the balance early on, and we just went through the rubber too quickly.
“But then I think we had better pace than we showed. The race pace was a question mark. Because I felt like we did some really improvements.”
Regarding Silverstone, he said: “I just hope to have a clean weekend and a day where everything can be straightforward.”
The seventh place was actually Perez’s best result in the last five races, a run that included his crashes in Monaco and Canada.
“Again, it was a tricky race for him,” said RBR team boss Christian Horner when asked about Perez’s weekend.
“He had quite a significant contact on the first lap with [Piastri]. He had quite a big hole in the sidepod, and then the loss of straight-line speed that gives you, it’s a bit like an air brake.
“And so that’s why he was struggling on straight-line speed. So difficult to judge Checo’s race, due to the due to the damage that he had.”
