Revealed: Why Sergio Perez lost over a second to Verstappen and called Ocon an ‘idiot’ in Austria Sprint quali

Max Verstappen took pole position in Sprint qualifying for the Austrian Grand Prix, and the Dutchman once again put in a perfect lap to finish on top of the timesheets while Sergio Perez could only manage P7 and was more than one second behind his Red Bull teammate. What is the reason for this huge gap?

Sergio Pérez is back in the spotlight after the Sprint qualifying in Austria. The Mexican finished P7, his best qualifying position since Miami, but finished 1.3 seconds behind Max Verstappen on pole.

Why Sergio Perez was left with big gap to Max Verstappen in Austria Sprint qualifying

Undoubtedly, this is a huge difference between team-mates with the same car, but this bad result has an explanation that went largely unnoticed on TV.

Perez had been behind Verstappen and Red Bull’s rivals throughout Sprint quali, that’s true.

But what happened in SQ3 was an unfortunate eventuality that added to the Mexican’s lack of pace. In fact, Perez’s lap in SQ2 on the medium tyre was four tenths faster than his lap in SQ3 on the soft tyre.

The gap between Perez and Verstappen was +0.426s at the end of SQ2. And yet Perez was still P8, because Leclerc did set a time, unlike in SQ3.

Both Alpines, also in SQ2, were +0.500s behind Verstappen who finished P1. However, in SQ3, as with Perez, the gap between Alpine and Max’s RB20 went up to 1.4s. And indeed, this eventuality is linked to that of the Mexican driver.

Perez was the ‘meat’ in an Alpine sandwich in the only SQ3 lap attempt they had.

Esteban Ocon , Perez and Pierre Gasly were the last drivers to leave the pit lane with a very tight time to reach the finish line and start a flying lap.

In fact, they were just few seconds away from not making it, in a very slow out-lap conditioned by Ocon.

Gasly, the last of the pack, complained over the radio to his race engineer: “What is Esteban doing?” To which Gasly’s engineer replied: “I don’t know, but we have to push.”

And this was the first and most important factor in Perez and the Alpine’s horrendous lap: a poor out-lap where they were forced to push and couldn’t get the tyres into the optimum operating temperature window.

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On the other hand, Perez was conditioned all lap long by the dirty air of Ocon’s A524 car.

A situation which made him furious on the radio at the end of SQ3: “Who cares, man? Who cares? This guy is such an idiot”, he said to his race engineer.

As we can see in the speed telemetry compared to Verstappen, Perez reaches higher top speeds thanks to Ocon’s slipstream, but in the corners he is particularly disadvantaged.

And if we put special emphasis on comparing Sector 2 and Sector 3 of both Red Bull drivers, we can see that there is no colour between Max’s pole lap and Sergio’s SQ3 lap. Therefore, that 1.3 seconds difference was not the ‘real’ difference between Verstappen and the Mexican.

Given Perez’s pace throughout the rest of the session, surely his highest aspiration today was ‘stealing’ P6 from Lewis Hamilton, who was also somewhat hampered at the end of his lap by Charles Leclerc – although obviously to a much lesser extent than Perez with the Alpine of Esteban Ocon.

We can’t estimate an exact time for Perez had he had a clean lap, but it would certainly have been, as in SQ2, between +0.4s and +0.5s to Max Verstappen. Not enough for him to be at the same level as his team-mate and both McLaren drivers.

So, this 1.3 second gap between Perez and Verstappen is more Red Bull’s mistake for allowing Esteban Ocon to slip between Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez in the pit lane and relying on the Frenchman in the out-lap rather than a bad performance from Checo.

It was crucial to be in a good position on track to create a decent gap to the driver in front and not compromise the tyre warm-up for the flying lap.

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