Perez angry with himself over engine map error

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Sergio Perez was left angry with himself for making an error with his engine maps at the start of his final run in qualifying at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.

The Mexican qualified eighth quickest on Saturday evening, one place and 0.018s behind team-mate Nico Hulkenberg. However, Perez was left unhappy after feeling he lost time at the start of his final lap in Q3 due to being in the wrong engine mode.

Asked if he got the most he could out of qualifying, Perez replied: "No, not really.

"Effectively my lap was good but I made a mistake with the engine map, just selected it too late because we’re running a different, manual thing. So I have to select it manually, all the run switches, so I forgot to select the qualifying mode and therefore I lost a tenth going into Turn 1. So with that tenth definitely P7 was achievable.

"So not the best I could have done, a bit angry with myself because I made a mistake but it’s something that we will change for the future, so for next year. It’s good that it happened today and not in a more important qualifying.”

Despite his own disappointment, Perez says the qualifying result is as good as it possibly could have been from a team point of view.

“Yeah I think it was a great achievement, I think we took the maximum out of the car. The gap was very little between me and Nico throughout all the runs so I think we pushed each other very hard. The conditions were difficult out there with the tailwinds into Turn 8 and Turn 11, it was not easy to stop the car. So you saw many people not getting the best out of today, but I think as a team we did it so we can be quite pleased with that.

“Probably we did a pretty good job today, we maximised the full potential of the car. So I’m pretty satisfied with that and I’m looking forward to doing even better tomorrow. It’s a shame we are so far away from the teams ahead but we will try our best.”

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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.