Sergio Pérez frustrated at failing to complete the double at the Chinese Grand Prix

Sergio Pérez already knew he wouldn’t secure second place in the Chinese GP. The safety car was responsible for him falling behind Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc. Team principal Horner agreed that the timing of the safety car had thwarted Red Bull’s chances of achieving another one-two finish, with Pérez being between six and nine tenths slower than his teammate.

Unfortunately, with the safety car, we lost two places and I did most of the race on hard tires, we had to fight with that. In the end, the tires lose a lot of performance. It could have been a nice double, it’s a pity. I think I was lacking pace today, especially on certain tire compounds. I was losing balance in the car, we didn’t manage everything as we wanted. The pace was a bit off. I will try to give it my all in Miami, said the Mexican driver.

« The safety car arrived at the wrong time. We did indeed have to adopt the same strategy as the other drivers for the second half of the race, which cost Checo his place on the track », confirms Horner. « And after that, his tires simply weren’t good enough to keep up with Lando », adds the team principal.

Two pit stops slowed down the driver.

Charles Leclerc and Lando Norris delayed their first pit stop in Shanghai and were able to convert it into a single stop under a mid-race safety car, deployed to recover Valtteri Bottas’ stranded Sauber. Perez and his teammate Max Verstappen had already made a pit stop under green flag on the 13th lap. The yellow phase shortly after forced the Mexican to return to the pits after only ten laps with the new set of tires, as we had to align our strategy with Ferrari and McLaren for the final stint, as Horner explains. Perez had to use his hard tires to overtake Leclerc, which meant he had used up the tire life to catch up and pass Norris, who comfortably separated the two Red Bulls by climbing to second place in the standings.

At that moment, the gap was already quite large and given the quality of his pace during a first stint in terms of degradation, I knew it was going to be tight, added Pérez after finishing 6 seconds behind Norris and 19 behind Verstappen.

The tires have been overused

« It was actually the end of the race », explains the Red Bull driver himself, because he had to push his hard tires too much to make up for the lost positions. « The tire performance then drops significantly », he explains. And that’s why he could only catch up with Leclerc in the end, but not Norris.

« You use your tires so much. You put so much energy into them that they never really come back. It’s quite degraded and I paid the price for it.

The major difficulty: Leclerc’s hard tires were almost exactly the same age as Pérez’s hard tires. So, there was no advantage in terms of tires. This made overtaking difficult, explains Pérez. At least, we still made it to the podium, he points out. But Red Bull had different ideas for the 2024 Chinese GP, aiming for the fourth double win in the fifth race of the Formula 1 season.

Other factors explain the third place on the podium

Pérez is not entirely satisfied. The safety car situation concerns him, but from his point of view, the first stint was not perfect either: He just lacked a bit of pace on the medium (tire). Compared to his teammate Verstappen in the lead, he was losing a few tenths to half a second per lap, according to the analysis of F1 Tempo data.

Perez also admits a not so good start, which allowed Aston Martin driver Fernando Alonso to take P2 behind Verstappen from the beginning of the race. This is another reason why his medium tires did not remain in good condition, he explains: “I had to put a lot of pressure on them to overtake Fernando. It probably cost me a bit too much in terms of [tire performance].”

The Grand Prix report must provide more details. We need to think about what we could have done differently or better. But overall, it was a good weekend,” Pérez concluded. The World Cup standings confirm this impression: with 21 points, Pérez scored the second highest number of points in China.