Home favourite Perez unhappy after poor Q3

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Sergio Perez was without question the star of the show at the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez on Saturday, receiving rapturous support from his legion of fans during qualifying for his home Grand Prix.

Perez was even able to broadcast live comments to the crowd from the car when he took to the track.

"It was really, really good," he said. "I was happy to be able to speak to all of them at the start of the session."

The Force India driver went on to make it through to the final round of qualifying, but was frustrated not to perform better for the crowds after finishing in tenth place in Q3.

"Today hasn’t gone as I was hoping and that’s very disappointing," Perez admitted after the end of the session.

"We have been very competitive all weekend, but we couldn’t achieve the result we wanted at the most important moment.

"I was quite satisfied in Q1 and our pace showed a lot of promise, but as the conditions changed we weren’t able to respond.

"We changed the [warm-up] strategy with the tyres after Q1. I was really competitive through Q1. Q2 run one was more or less okay but since then with the track improvement we just went slower.

"I lost all my feeling with the car," he sighed. "Getting the tyres in the right window was difficult and I was unhappy with the balance. It’s something we will need to analyse tonight."

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"It meant that I was not able to improve to find the lap time that I was after," he added. "That meant qualifying P10, which is a very bad result for us today."

"Hopefully tomorrow we can have a strong start and gain some places," he continued. "The race depends so much on the start, what you can do.

"Tomorrow’s race will be challenging, but our car has very good pace," he insisted. "Let's see what we can do."

In past races, Perez has often found success by managing to run longer tyre stints than his rivals. But the Mexican Grand Prix is expected to be a one stop race for everyone, meaning that the tactic won't work this time.

"The strategy there is probably not a lot you can do," he admitted.

Despite the disappointment of his grid position, Perez was committed to giving his fans the best show possible on Sunday.

"I want to give my fans something to celebrate," he said. "All weekend I have received an incredible amount of support and today they deserved a lot more.

"I hope we can give them a better result tomorrow," he added.

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.