During the practice session earlier on Saturday, Perez managed to get into fifth place. But before qualifying, he felt his Red Bull car wasn’t performing well.
Even though the team made some adjustments to his car, it didn’t help him do better in qualifying. He ended up in 18th place, just ahead of the Saubers.
Perez thought the main problem was the heavy traffic on the track. He also mentioned that stickers from the walls were coming off because of passing cars, which affected his lap.
He said, “It was a disaster because firstly on my lap I encountered a lot of traffic into Turn 6, into 7 and there were some stickers laying down on the apex of 8 so I had to avoid all of that.” He lost a couple of tenths of a second because of this, which would have been enough to get him into the next round of qualifying. He was disappointed because he was only half a second behind the fastest lap time, so it was a complete disaster for him.
Perez missed getting into the next round of qualifying by almost two tenths of a second. He couldn’t improve enough on his last lap to beat Esteban Ocon’s lap time in 15th place.
He thought that the progress they saw in the practice session earlier in the day didn’t continue into qualifying. He believed that because passing is very difficult on the Monte Carlo circuit, his weekend was pretty much over.
He said, “And basically, the weekend is totally over because here there is no chance to overtake, unfortunately.” He felt they were making progress earlier in the day, but the changes they made to the car weren’t enough to help him get through qualifying. He was disappointed because he thought just doing a normal lap would have been enough, but because of the heavy traffic, it was really difficult.
