In a look back at the past F1 season, Sergio Perez admits that he started to doubt himself due to the many disappointing results. After a particularly bad race weekend in Qatar, Perez stated that he came to the realization that the problem was not specifically his fault, but that there must be an underlying problem.
Sergio Perez had a dramatically bad race weekend in Qatar, after which he spent three days of intense work with his engineers. Then his results gradually improved. But why did it take Qatar for this change to take place?
“Because Qatar was really my worst race weekend that I could remember in a long time, probably my worst weekend ever in this sport,” Perez said at the end of the season in Abu Dhabi. “It was such a bad weekend that I really felt like, ‘I can’t be that bad, something must be going on.’
“When you have those back-to-back races it sometimes feels like you don’t have enough time to go through everything. I really felt like we needed to take a little more time to understand what was going on.”
“Obviously there was a difference because of the set-up of the car that we were playing with from weekend to weekend and just not making any progress.”
“But once we figured it out we understood a lot of things that we were trying to compensate for. It simply meant we weren’t doing the right things.”
“I think it was very good on our side. What happened was not good, but it was very good how we handled it and how it strengthened our team.”