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Sergio Perez is confident that he can turn a corner in the final two races of the 2024 season after another low points finish at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, with the Mexican determined to iron out the issues that have affected his performances.
In the last five race weekends, Perez has only managed to score nine points – in the same timeframe, his team mate Max Verstappen not only secured his fourth world championship, but also claimed 90 points.
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Red Bull ran into problems with their development and upgrades during the summer races, which appeared to impact Perez’s performance to a greater degree than his team mate’s while teams like McLaren and Ferrari were able to take advantage to surge ahead in the constructors’ standings.
The Milton Keynes outfit recovered some pace as the season went on, but the 34-year-old has continued to struggle to reach the higher points-paying positions – in Las Vegas, a Q1 exit forced him into a recovery drive in the night race.
Speaking about his underwhelming P10 finish, Perez said: “I think yesterday we understood what happened – this is the way it is right now. We are close to turning things around. The pace is there, it’s coming.
“We’re making progress and we understood exactly what happened yesterday in qualifying. We should have done a better job and we didn’t, so we will work hard as a team to get back in the last two races.”
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A common issue across the weekend was the low-grip track and cooler temperatures, which prevented Perez from getting his tyres in the correct window during qualifying and resulted in him failing to reach Q2 for the sixth time this season.
Tyre troubles carried over into the 50-lap race for the Red Bull driver – he started on hard tyres on the slippery track, before enduring a 20-lap stint on medium tyres. A second pit stop saw him drop back to P15 and he battled through the field to take a single point at the chequered flag.
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“I think we got caught out with the level of degradation that we had out there,” he summarised after the race. “We were not expecting this level of deg, and that really hurt us quite a lot unfortunately.
“We used the best tyre at the wrong time and then I had to do quite a long stint on the medium – that was quite vulnerable in the middle so it was all a little bit out of sync unfortunately.”
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