Perez puzzled by off-the-pace Racing Point in Monaco

Sergio Perez finished Free Practice 2 for the Monaco Grand Prix in a lowly 15th place for Racing Point, over 1.6s adrift of the leading times. The worst part? His car actually felt pretty good around the Principality’s streets…

Perez labelled the previous Spanish Grand Prix as “a weekend to forget” for Racing Point, as he struggled to 15th place in the race, while team mate Lance Stroll crashed out of 14th after coming-together with the McLaren of Lando Norris. And while Perez couldn’t deny that his car had felt nicer to drive around Monaco than it had in Barcelona, that appeared to be precisely the problem…

“The car is feeling better,” he said. “A bit more harmony in the car in terms of balance – which is a concern. It’s a worry for me, because we are not where we should be, and that is definitely a concern.

“The bad thing is that… the balance is not bad, so we don’t have any lap time to find in terms of balance. But we’ll see… what we are able to extract from the car and hopefully get that half a second that we are looking to get.”

Perez at least had a better time of it than team mate Stroll, who actually finished behind the Williams pair in P19 in Free Practice 1, before ending FP2 in 18th, 1.806s behind Perez, to cap off an unhappy Thursday for Racing Point in Monte Carlo.

Despite that, Perez still felt that, with the whole of Friday to hone their car’s performance and the tightness of the midfield group – with 0.4s covering P10 to Perez’s P15 in FP2 – reaching the third part of qualifying was not an impossibility for him on Saturday, at a track where he’s started in the top 10 every year since 2013.

“It’s going to be very tight that midfield group, as always,” he said. “We are probably on the back foot, but we’ll see what we are able to do for the coming race and hopefully [on Saturday] we can be in contention for Q3.”