Sergio Perez says he can be strong at any circuit this season given his improved performance across the last two Japanese Grand Prix weekends.
Suzuka was towards the end of the 2023 calendar and Perez struggled in October, qualifying some 0.8s off Max Verstappen in fifth place, and then retiring after multiple collisions. This time around, Perez was just 0.066s off his teammate in qualifying and comfortably finished second, and he sees the result as indicative of his potential for the entire season.
“I think we are in a good momentum,” Perez said. “I think if you remember here last year, it was probably my worst weekend. So I think if we are strong in places like this with a lot of high-speed content, medium-speed, I think we can be strong anywhere else. It’s been a good weekend.”
Perez looked able to stay relatively close to Verstappen for much of the first part of the race before fading from contention, and he says it was higher than expected tire degradation that compromised his chances of sticking with his teammate.
“With the start, doing that restart again is always quite hard to keep the focus for such a long period of time. It worked alright. My second start was a little bit better, but just not enough to get Max.
“I think we paid the price a little bit because we were a little bit off balance on that first stint, which meant we couldn’t keep it alive. We had to box and we were undercut by Lando [Norris]. And then I had to push too much on that medium stint. But then on the hard stint, I was a lot more comfortable, and the pace came back. But yeah, I think I suffered a bit from that first stint being a bit unbalanced.”
The struggles in the first stint were highlighted by a slight off-track moment at the second Degner corner, with Perez feeling he lost touch with Verstappen at that stage.
“It was quite a tricky corner. A lot of people went out there. I just went in over the curb and I was just hoping to don’t pick up any damage because it’s so easy with these floors to go off and have damage. As far as I know, we don’t have any. I just understeered wide and went over the curb.
“Once you are at the top of the curb, it’s game over. You just have to let the car roll, go over it, because it’s better to be over than on top of it. But I obviously picked up a lot of dirt on my tires, which took a lap or two to really clean up, and I lost a couple of seconds with that.”