Sergio Perez believes his setup experiment during the Sprint race in Qatar helped Red Bull make “good progress” for the main event.

Red Bull struggled for pace through the Sprint running at the Lusail Circuit, but turned things around in qualifying for the Grand Prix as Max Verstappen claimed a seemingly unlikely pole position.

Sergio Perez: I didn’t go as aggressive as Max Verstappen

With Perez failing to make it out of SQ1, the Mexican driver committed to a pitlane start as Red Bull made setup changes to his car in a bid to better refine the RB20 for the demands of the Lusail Circuit.

This experimentation included Perez making a stop during the 19-lap event, with tweaks being made to the front wing to further evaluate where to put the car in terms of setup.

By sacrificing Perez’s Sprint race, rather than trying to fight back for a very unlikely points finish, it allowed Red Bull some additional time to fettle the car – time being the main resource missing to the teams during a Sprint weekend.

Asked to explain his race following the qualifying session, in which he qualified ninth to Verstappen’s pole, the Mexican driver revealed the experimentation had helped define the right direction once the parc fermé conditions lifted following the Sprint.

“We made progress on the day, with the testing I did this morning, I think we found some good direction,” he told media, including PlanetF1.com.

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“I think, unfortunately, I didn’t go as aggressive as Max did on the setup side, but I think it was definitely good progress.

“Hopefully, tomorrow in the race, that will be all a lot more together. The balance will be working a lot better.”

Perez’s eagerness to run in clear air led to a bizarre scene as the light went green at the end of the pitlane – only for the Red Bull driver to sit motionless while Franco Colapinto – also starting from the pitlane – had to go around him to start his race.

“I was mainly… we wanted to have a big gap,” Perez said of the incident.

“One of the reasons we started from the pit lane was not to recover all the positions and get to the points. We know that would be quite hard, and we wanted a big gap to the people ahead, to have as much clear traffic as possible.

“Luckily, he managed to get through. It was important we tried a lot of things, but we wanted to have that gap to be in clear air for most of the race.

“Sometimes, with this short racing when you are out of position, it just makes sense to prepare for the rest of the weekend, as there are not a lot of points, and the main race is tomorrow.”

With Verstappen revealing that “a miracle happened” as he paid tribute to the work at the factory and in the simulator, he weighed in on Perez’s contribution to helping define the direction for the qualifying and Grand Prix.

“We [made] already a step in a direction, and I think then we went a bit more aggressive on it overall, I would say,” he said.

Christian Horner, Red Bull team boss, had admitted his team had a “mountain to climb” after only managing an eighth place finish in the Sprint, but revealed some of the thinking behind sending Perez out on his 19-lap test.

“[It’s] part of that testing process. So we got a bit of data out of it,” he said.

“There was no chance we were going to score any points.

“So we may as well use that session to get something out of it. So we changed the wing. We tried something a bit different, which gives us and the engineers some some good information for the qualifying.”

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