The Mexican driver, Sergio Pérez, has lost his fourth position for the sprint race of the 2022 Formula 1 Austrian Grand Prix after meeting with the stewards after being investigated for a controversial action during qualifying this Friday.
Checo Pérez reached Q3 with the sixth fastest time, but in the break between Q2 and the last round, Race Direction announced an investigation into the Red Bull driver for having exceeded the track limits at turn 9 during his lap 15 of the session, so he will finally start thirteenth.
The stewards of the event called Pérez to testify after qualifying. The one from Guadalajara had managed to finish fourth in Q3, alongside Carlos Sainz on the second row of the grid, but the race stewards have finally decided to erase his Q3 times, which has made him fall back nine positions.
In the statement, the FIA explained that the ideal decision would have been to delete the lap in question referring to Q2, but since this was not done at the right time and it was allowed to compete in Q3, the aforementioned measure was adopted.
“The usual sanction is to erase the lap time in question.”
“However, as a consequence, the driver would not have progressed to Q3 and therefore, in fairness to all other competitors, the stewards have ordered that all lap times from that point on also be erased.
For his part, Checo Pérez said after the session, before knowing his sanction, that the day had not been easy.
“It’s been a difficult day. From the first session, things didn’t feel very good, so we have to try to understand what happened on our end and I hope that tomorrow we’ll be able to recover.”
“To be honest, I wasn’t able to find the rhythm. Now we have to think about tomorrow’s sprint race and the longer race ahead of us on Sunday, so we have to keep our heads down and push hard to try and make some progress in tomorrow’s sprint and thus get a good starting position for Sunday’s race,” he concluded.
