When the light goes out, you’re supposed to go

Red Bull boss Christian Horner says he doesn’t understand why Sergio Perez botched his pitlane start in Qatar’s Formula 1 sprint race, allowing Franco Colapinto to overtake him.

Perez and his Williams rival, who having both fallen in Friday’s SQ1 were due to line up towards the back of the grid, were starting from the pits after their cars had suspension set-up changes under parc ferme conditions.

But when the pit exit light went green, Perez did not move at first. When he did finally get away, Colapinto managed to get some momentum on the Mexican and overtook him before they got to the first corner.

Horner says there is no obvious explanation as to what Perez was up to, as it is obvious cars are supposed to go when the lights change.

“I need to have a chat with him about it,” Horner told Sky. “It looked like he just misjudged it. But when the light goes out, you’re supposed to go.”

Perez himself suggested that the delay in leaving the pits was deliberate as he wanted to ensure that there was a big enough distance to the cars ahead of him so he could run alone on track.

“I wanted to open a gap with the people in front to go with clean air,” said Perez, who knew that battling through to finish in the points would be almost impossible.

“We were almost five minutes stopped in the pits, and I had no temperature in the tyres. It was important to go with clean air to find the car, to see where we are.”

Christian Horner, Team Principal, Red Bull Racing, Sergio Perez, Red Bull Racing

Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool

Once he got going, Perez said the handling problems that he has struggled with already this weekend were still present.

“At the end we have that disconnect with the balance that is costing us a lot,” he said. “I don’t think we have improved. I think, on the contrary, we have to make changes for the rest of the weekend.

“The problems continued. We have this disconnection that we want a lot of stability on the entry, but then in fast corners we have no front end at all.

“On one of the most loaded circuits of the year, we’re about to take the whole front wing (set-up) off. There’s something we can’t find, we have a big disconnect.”

Perez stopped late on to fit a different front wing as Red Bull continued experiments to try to get to the bottom of what is happening with its RB20.

Max Verstappen struggled to finish eighth in the sister car and reported afterwards that his RB20 “felt like a rally car”.

Horner added: “It was part of that testing process, so we got a bit of data out of him. There was no chance we were going to score any points, so we may as well use that session to get something out of it.

“We changed the wing. We tried something a bit different, which gives us and the engineers some good information for the qualifying a little bit later.”