Lewis Hamilton’s impeeding of Sergio Perez during the first segment of Saturday’s Formula 1 Dutch Grand Prix qualifying proved “costly” for the Mexican in the Q3 top-10 shootout.
Hamilton received a three-place grid penalty for the incident that saw the Mercedes driver moving slowly at the exit of Turn 9, causing Perez, on a hot lap, to back right off.
The aborted push-lap forced Perez to use an extra set of soft tyres to make it through Q1, leaving him with just one fresh set by the time the top-10 Q3 shootout came around.
Perez ultimately qualified in fifth place, four-tenths back from his team-mate Max Verstappen who secured second.
“I think it was wrong time, wrong moment,” Perez said of the Hamilton incident.
“Lewis was on the racing line, so there was nothing I could do, other than fitting another set, which was very costly in Q3.
“I think our qualifying could have looked a bit different with two sets [of tyres in Q3].”
With just one substantial push run in Q3 to set his grid position, Perez noted “you don’t want to mess it up,” ruing that “The lap wasn’t that clean, whereas when you have two sets you can attack a lot more the first one [lap].”
Perez went into the summer break on a dismal run of form that constituted just 28 points across an eight-race period, paving the way for speculation regarding the safety of his Red Bull seat.
Red Bull has given Perez the opportunity to rediscover his for the rest of the campaign and Team Principal Chrisitan Horner claimed that Zandvoort was an outlier amid a run of strong tracks for the Mexican driver (Monza, Baku and Singapore).
With that in mind, fifth place in qualifying represented a positive result for Perez and he reflected on a good Dutch GP weekend thus far.
“I think at least from our side we’ve understood a lot of things with our car,” he said.
“So that’s very promising. Now we can ramp up our upgrades in the coming races because now we are understanding a lot more the package, so this is the most promising thing from the weekend.”
Having confidence in his RB20 is imperative to Perez’s progress and he said “I think we are making the right progress with the right approach.
“There is a long race ahead of us [on Sunday.]”
