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Brake balance issue behind Perez's Saturday woes
Red Bull needs to fix a brake balance issue that Sergio Perez says was the cause of his off in qualifying for the Australian Grand Prix.
Perez had a torrid time in final practice on Saturday, running off track on four occasions and complaining about an issue, before duly getting stuck in the gravel at Turn 3 on his first flying lap of Q1. Without a time to his name in qualifying he will line-up 20th on the grid, and Perez says Red Bull has work to do to fix his car’s gremlins.
“We had a bit of a technical issue already from FP3 and we thought we’d fixed that, but we obviously didn’t and it was really difficult,” Perez said. “Very difficult to do anything out there, just braking I became a passenger as soon as I touched the brakes. It's something that is moving the brake balance quite far forwards under braking and I just hope we are able to fix it as a team tomorrow and be able to race and minimize the damage.”
And Perez admits the car isn’t in a competitive state to race if the problem isn’t resolved overnight.
“It was just changing the brake balance quite far forwards as soon as I was braking, so a really difficult one.
“No (you can’t drive the car like that), that’s why it will be very important to fix it for tomorrow … I trust totally my team that we will be able to overcome this problem and be able to have a strong race pace.”
The Mexican is one point behind team-mate Max Verstappen in the early championship standings but says the incident shows how hard Red Bull is pushing to have the advantage it has enjoyed so far this year.
“It shows the margins already in qualifying how close everyone is. If we are not able to put it all together every single Saturday and Sunday the competition is very strong.”
Chris Medland
While studying Sports Journalism at the University of Central Lancashire, Chris managed to talk his way into working at the British Grand Prix in 2008 and was retained for three years before joining ESPN F1 as Assistant Editor. After three further years at ESPN, a spell as F1 Editor at Crash Media Group was followed by the major task of launching F1i.com’s English-language website and running it as Editor. Present at every race since the start of 2014, he has continued building his freelance portfolio, working with international titles. As well as writing for RACER, his broadcast work includes television appearances on F1 TV and as a presenter and reporter on North America's live radio coverage on SiriusXM.
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