Sergio Pérez achieved a fifth place in the sprint race, which will be the position he will occupy on the starting grid on Sunday after having climbed eight places at Red Bull Ring , venue of the 2022 F1 Austrian Grand Prix. His teammate, Max Verstappen, took the victory.
Pérez had finished the classification held on Friday in fourth position, but lost it after the stewards made the decision to delete all his laps of Q3 and lap 17 of Q2, with which he had accessed the group of the ten most fast, for exceeding the track limits.
This penalty delayed him to 13th on the grid for the sprint race, initially planned for 24 laps but reduced to 23 after Guanyu Zhou’s aborted start due to problems.
The Red Bull driver attacked from the first meters, and in the first lap he had already gained five positions to place himself within the top eight, before approaching Mick Schumacher’s Haas and beginning to chain overtakes on the German, the Danish Kevin Magnussen and Esteban Ocon’s Alpine.
These maneuvers took him to fifth place and, although he tried to close the five second gap he had with George Russell’s Mercedes, he was unable to reach fourth place.
“A good start tomorrow and we can be in the fight from lap 1,” Checo Pérez told the FOX Sports microphones.
“We were able to recover to get to the finish, then I had the track limits issue and I wasn’t going to get to Russell anyway.”
“A fifth place that is important for us because we can fight from there tomorrow,” added the Mexican.
When talking about the sanction imposed on Friday, Pérez was unhappy with the way the decisions were made, since his sanction should have been imposed in Q2, the session in which he committed the infraction.
“In the end, yes, I was outside the track limits, but I paid for the result of a system that is not working. I was penalized for something that happened in Q2.”
