It wasn't a great start to the Hungarian Grand Prix for Red Bull, with an early accident for Sergio Perez in first practice and Max Verstappen still mulling over the effectiveness team's latest upgrades to the RB19.
Perez triggered a red flag in FP1 after clipping the grass heading into turn 5 at the Hungaroring and losing control, causing him to slid off and into a hefty impact with the barriers.
It meant he missed all of the session as the engineers scrambled to repair the car in time for second practice later in the day, which they ultimately succeeded in doing.
“It was just a mistake from my side,” said Perez as he reflected on the opening day. “But the guys have done a tremendous job to get the car together and get some running in FP2. At least we got some good data to look through."
"He just misjudged it," commented Red Bull team principal Christian Horner. "It was just a mistake. You could hear the frustration in his voice."
“I can't get my head around that, it's a rookie error," commented Sky Sports F1 commentator Martin Brundle. “I can only assume it's the pressure. He didn't just clip the edge of the grass or the white line, he was on the grass by a metre or so.
"I'm sure he's been feeling a lot of pressure from different directions," added former NASCAR and IndyCar driver. "It's obviously been heightened by the Daniel Ricciardo situation and the potential of him going to the team in the future.”
Perez didn't end up losing out on much track time, with rain starting to fall before the session resumed. Despite missing out on track time earlier, he ran just 14 laps in FP2 which saw him lock-up and flat-spot his soft tyres.
That's a problem at a weekend where new tyres rules apply for Saturday's qualifying session, meaning that teams are short of allocations of their preferred compounds compared to earlier in the season.
“Obviously with the weekend format in terms of tyre usage, it will be very important to be able to get a good balance through basically all the compounds," Perez acknowledged. "In qualifying we’re going to be going through them all.
"It was great to get some good information and data to look through," he added. "I think we will have a better idea tomorrow."
Instead, the team concentrated on bedding in new upgrades. Asked how they were looking, Perez replied: “I think it’s very early in that regard, given the little running that we ended up doing with the tyre format that we have.
"I am positive about qualifying tomorrow and we have everything in place to go out and have a solid weekend," he added. "Certainly, the grid looks really, really tight
Although he didn't have the same dramas as his team mate, Verstappen was uncharacteristically out of position at the end of Friday, where he was just 11th fastest on the timing screens after completing just 18 laps.
"Very hard to comment on," he said when asked how the new parts on the car were doing. "We’ll look through the data to see if everything is correlating very well, because we haven’t actually used a lot of tyre sets today.
"With this new [qualifying] format you are super limited with the tyres you can use and I didn’t want to use them today, so we could have a better preparation tomorrow.
"The car felt not too bad. A bit of understeer, but I went out again. And also the long run looked quite competitive. It’s a bit difficult to say over one-lap pace, but I think overall the car is still strong.”
Asked if he was still confident of taking pole tomorrow, Verstappen replied: "We want to of course be the quickest, but at the moment we first need to do a bit more running with more tyre sets to get a bit more of a better understanding.”
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