Sergio Perez has admitted that his battle to overtake Charles Leclerc cost him the chance to catch Lando Norris for second place in Formula 1’s Chinese Grand Prix.
Perez started alongside Red Bull team-mate Max Verstappen on the front row but was compromised into Turn 1 and slipped behind Fernando Alonso’s Aston Martin.
Although the Mexican would dispatch Alonso into Turn 6 on the fifth lap of the race, Verstappen had soared clear and opened up a five-second advantage at the front.
“Yeah, I obviously was on the inside of Max and had to brake earlier, and Fernando was on the outside,” Perez said.
“My start wasn’t that good, so that meant that I lost a place to Fernando, and again I had to fight quite hard to get by him.
“Probably used a little bit too much my tyres, and that put me definitely in the back foot for the first stint, so it wasn’t a straightforward race.
“But I also felt like we went in the opposite way with the changes we made from the Sprint event into the race. I felt like we probably took a little bit of a backstep.”
Perez was unable to match the Dutchman’s blistering pace and he dropped behind Lando Norris and Charles Leclerc when the pair pitted under the Virtual Safety Car.
The Red Bull driver spent several laps behind the Ferrari prior to completing a move, which presented him with too much ground to recover on the McLaren car ahead.
“At that point, the gap was already quite big, and given how good his pace was on the first stint in terms of the degradation, I knew it was going to be close,” he said.
“But once we had the same pace, and once you go by the car ahead and you start fighting, how many laps we end up fighting between Charles and myself, then it’s really game over.
“You use so much of your tyre, you put so much energy into them that they never really come back. It’s quite a high-deg place, and I paid the price.
“But that was the only way I could get by Charles, because we were obviously at the same age tyres, and it was really difficult to get by Charles.”
Perez had also been made to climb through the order to clinch third in the Sprint encounter and he admitted that traffic exasperated the balance issues he combated.
“Well, I think I was just basically fighting in the pack,” he explained. “Once you are in the pack, it’s so hard to get a read from what the balance actually does.
“When you have two or three cars ahead of you, you have a lot less load in your car, so it’s really hard to know where your balance is at.
“It’s just a limitation that I had today, but probably it’s something we’ve got to review to see the directions we’ve taken, to see what we could have done better.”
