Sergio Perez isn’t optimistic about the quality of racing on Bahrain’s ‘Outer Circuit’, predicting a “train of cars” in Sunday’s race.
The Mexican will start fifth for the Sakhir Grand Prix, this after Charles Leclerc stunned the grid by clinching fourth in a Ferrari that has struggled on the short, high-speed all weekend.
However, at the same time, Perez isn’t that surprised by his drop off in pace due to the repercussions from his heartbreaking engine failure with three laps to go a week ago.
“I think it’s about where we ended up, I don’t think there was much in it,” he said post-session. “Given the age of the engine I’m running here after I lost my fresh engine in the last race, I think we are being penalised by it.
“It’s going to be a hard race for us tomorrow, here straight-line speed is crucial, to be able to race and to pass, so still a lot to play for tomorrow and hopefully, we can score some good points and hopefully bring the engine home.”
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Offering his view on the 3.5km ‘Outer Circuit’, while admitting the layout itself is proving quite fun, with 87 laps to come in the race, Perez does fear it could be quite processional.
“It’s tricky, it’s very difficult to put everything together with so few corners, half a tenth on your driving is like two tenths in other places, so as a driver, you can probably do more of a difference, but I don’t think it will be good for racing,” he explained.
“I hope I’m wrong, but I just think it’s going to be a train of cars doing a shuffle
“I still believe after the first stop, overtaking can be hard, but maybe at that point, there’s a big tyre advantage so it becomes a bit easier, still a lot of unknowns, certainly on Friday it wasn’t easy to overtake,” Perez added.
As for Racing Point teammate Lance Stroll, he’s set to start P10 after being one of several drivers to be caught out by the bumps and kerbs in the middle sector.
“We had a broken floor after Q2, so we lost a load of downforce on the rear and lost a lot of lap time in Q3,” he said.
“I don’t know what, I mean I do know what happened., but it’s a shame because it wasn’t really a lot of exit kerb, and it just destroyed the whole floor and that was really bad for lap time. It that just sucks, because we had a lot more pace.”
