F1 | Australian GP | Sergio Perez ends P3 in Australian qualifying session: “I’m not happy with Q3 strategy, but P2 was the best we could achieve today"
The Mexican Red Bull driver is not very happy with his performance today, worsened by the multiple yellow and red flags, which led him to gain just P3 for tomorrow’s race
Not the qualifying session Sergio Perez and Red Bull expected in Australia. The Mexican driver suffered because of the multiple interruptions during the session, which made Red Bull’s tyre strategy look not good.
About this Perez said: “Q3 was a bit of a mess because we never really could try our strategy with the tyres, so we went into Q3. The double push didn’t make it any better. The best we could achieve today is P2 and P3, but pole for me was not possible.”
Perez managed to get P2 in the first runs of the final segment, just one thousandth behind the poleman Charles Leclerc, but after the red flag everything got worse for the Milton Keynes’s team.
He ultimately lost out on a front row start to teammate Max Verstappen by less than a tenth of a second.
Perez said: “We were so good in Q1 and Q2, and our strategy seemed to be the best. But after the red flag, our cards got shuffled. The restart is never that easy. I hope we did not fail the tyre strategy in Q3 in view of tomorrow. I think it’s going to be a very exciting race and I hope we can make all the fans here happy.”
Perez has also been summoned by the stewards for apparently ignoring yellow flags during qualifying after George Russell had gone down the run off at Turn 11.
If the stewards find him guilty he could get a three-place grid pealty. About this he commented: “I lifted for more than half a second on the straight; I lost six tenths so I think it should be a very straight forward meeting.”
