Red Bull team principal Christian Horner says Sergio Perez had the pace to win the Azerbaijan Grand Prix before being taken out of the race in a crash with Carlos Sainz on the penultimate lap.
Perez had been battling Charles Leclerc for second place (pictured) when he became tangled in a duel with Sainz, who was closing in on a podium finish with fresher tires in the final stages of the race.
Sainz slipped past Perez at the first turn but missed the apex at Turn 2, opening the door to the Mexican, who got a better exit to drag the Spaniard side by side down to Turn 3. But the two made heavy contact halfway down the straight that ended with both cars clattering into the barriers, forcing a virtual safety car that effectively ended the grand prix.
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The crash was deemed a racing incident in a post-session investigation, with the stewards declaring that while Sainz was drifting towards the middle of the track, Perez could have done more to avoid the collision.
“It’s hugely frustrating,” Horner said before the stewards issued their ruling. “I’ve just watched the incident several times and you can quite clearly see Carlos — if you take the wall as a reference and the white line on the right-hand side of the track — look in his mirror and just drift to the left, knowing that he was there, and Checo doesn’t move left or right. Hugely frustrating to lose that.”
Horner was particularly disappointed that Perez’s first strong race in months went unrewarded.
“I thought he was super,” he said. “It’s frustrating because Checo certainly should’ve been on the podium at the very least in third place, probably second.
“Actually, he could’ve won that race had he not lost a lot of time behind Alex Albon initially and then Lando [Norris] while he was on new tires and Oscar was still out on the old tires.”
McLaren’s team tactics paid lucrative dividends. While Perez was the first of the leading trio to pit for what should have been a powerful undercut, he happened to rejoin the track behind Norris, who started in 15th and was engaging in a long recovery drive.
Norris was asked to slow Perez to give Piastri an extra lap’s tire offset, and the Briton duly obliged with some clever defensive driving through the castle section that allowed his teammate to rejoin from his pit stop fractionally ahead of Perez.
“Lando backed him up, which allowed Oscar to keep track position, and I think without that we would’ve been ahead of Oscar and he would’ve passed Leclerc and he would’ve been fine,” Horner said.
“I thought Checo had a very strong weekend and he had great pace throughout that race. To sit on the tail of that for the entire grand prix distance — he was on the pace throughout the weekend.
“He was demonstrating race-winning performance today. Of course it’s a track that he’s always excelled at, but I think we’ve understood a few things with the car, and it was good to see certainly Checo’s car in contention for the win throughout the race. It’s just a great shame for him not to have capitalized with a podium, which has been costly in constructors points and in crash damage.”
While the points loss from the crash wasn’t the difference between Red Bull retaining and losing the constructors championship lead, it did allow McLaren to open a healthy 20-point advantage in one fell swoop rather than the more modest margin it was set to claim with Piastri in third.
“We’re pushing hard,” Horner said. “We’re now not defending, we’re chasing, so it changes the dynamic again. We’re just going to throw everything at it.”