The Friday of the return of the Singapore Grand Prix to Formula 1 has not been easy for Sergio ‘Checo’ Pérez, who lost valuable track time due to a problem in his RB18 in the first minutes of FP1 and that cost him half of the second session on Friday.
Checo Pérez came to lead Free Practice 1, but in the final minutes he was unable to leave the pits due to problems with his transmission shaft, with which his time fell several positions in the time table. However, he remained in the top five, and his mechanics were able to fix the car in the break between the two sessions.
“It looks like the driveshaft, we need to understand what caused it. It won’t affect him for the next session, but the first analysis indicates it was the driveshaft,” explained Christian Horner, Red Bull team principal.
However, the Mexican driver missed the first 30 minutes of FP2, and on his first outing on track his RB18 was quite unstable, difficult to control and even touched the wall on several occasions when Checo was looking for the limits of the track.
In the end, Pérez finished with the ninth fastest time, with a lap of 1:43.906, a time worse than the time of the first session, 1.319 seconds behind Carlos Sainz, who led FP2 with his Ferrari.
“I felt more comfortable in FP1. In fact, I was faster in FP1, so I think we have good data to analyze and try to get the best out of it,” Pérez said in the media area when taking stock of his day, before noting that they expected a strong performance from Ferrari: “We knew they were going to be strong, so we expected this.”
Checo Pérez commented that his lack of track time was not the best way to start the weekend, but they hope that with the data collected at the Marina Bay track they can turn the situation around.
“First of all, we lost a little bit of time in FP2, we had an engine problem. And then we did a lot of setup changes, so there’s a lot of information to review for tonight. We’re going to study the good parts and tomorrow we’ll try to do it. the best possible with what we have,” he concluded.
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