‘Caught napping’ and P20 - what happened to Sergio Perez?

Sergio Perez was “caught napping” at the start of the F1 Qatar Grand Prix sprint race, according to Red Bull team principal Christian Horner.

After a dreadful qualifying which saw Perez eliminated with a time only good enough for 16th, Red Bull elected to make changes to his set-up and start him from the pit lane.

There were bizarre scenes when Perez failed to immediately pull away when the green light flashed at the end of the pit lane, enabling Williams driver Franco Colapinto to get the jump and demote Perez to last place.

The incident left Horner puzzled, leading him to conclude that the Mexican was simply “caught napping”.

“I need to have a chat with him about it because it just looked like he was caught napping a little bit and obviously Colapinto got the jump on him,” Horner told the official F1 channel.

Speaking to Sky Sports F1, Horner added: "I need to have a chat with him about it. It looked like he just misjudged it. But when the light goes out, you're supposed to go."

Why did Perez pit?

Perez finished the 19-lap sprint 20th after making a pit stop to change his front wing.

Horner explained this was to collect valuable data for Red Bull in a bid to improve his fortunes over the remainder of what is turning out to be another torrid weekend.

“We managed to get some useful data from Checo in that race,” Horner said. “We managed to change the nose as well so we got some good feedback that hopefully we can use for this afternoon.

“Basically, on a day that we weren’t going to score points with him, it was better to get as much knowledge as we could. So that’s what we’ve done, we’ve got some data now to look at between now and the next session, so hopefully we can make good use of it.”

Perez echoed Horner’s assessment of his pit stop, saying: “The main objective of today was to be as further back as possible, to have as much clean air as possible. That was the objective.

“I think we managed to understand the car with the changes we’ve done. I think there is some room to improve what we have to do going forwards. We we have to try and bring a little bit more balance to the car.”

Perez is battling to retain his Red Bull seat for next season despite being under contract for 2025. He went into this weekend insisting he was 100 percent confident he would be racing for Red Bull next year.

Yuki Tsunoda and Liam Lawson, who race for Red Bull’s sister team RB, could be promoted to replace Perez, while Colapinto has been mooted as an alternative candidate.