Sergio Perez maybe soon for discussions with Red Bull team principal Christian Horner after his late reaction to the green light during his Qatar Grand Prix Sprint race in the pit lane start. The delay was taken advantage of by Williams’ Franco Colapinto, who overtook Perez in the pit lane. Reacting to the incident, Horner said he needed to speak to him because it looked like he was “caught napping”.

Perez and Colapinto started from the pit lane after their team made changes to the cars in parc ferme. But the race start was a moment that added to the Mexican driver’s poor weekend after qualifying in P16 for the sprint race.

When the light turned green, Perez hesitated for over a second before moving, allowing Colapinto to seize the opportunity and overtake him straight away. Speaking about the rather embarrassing incident for Red Bull, Horner said on F1TV, as reported by Motorsportweek.com:

“I need to talk to him about it because it just looked like he was caught napping a bit and obviously Colapinto got the jump on him.”

After Perez’s disappointing sprint qualifying, Red Bull chose to use the race as an opportunity to test and gather valuable data in clean air. This information will be compared with data collected during the upcoming session, allowing the team to analyze and draw important conclusions about the car’s performance. Red Bull took full advantage of the pass and also put Perez in for a front wing change later in the race. Speaking about the data collection exercise, Horner added:

“We managed to get some useful data from Checo in that race.

“We managed to change the nose as well so we got some good feedback which we can hopefully use for this afternoon.

“Basically, on a day we weren’t going to score 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 take advantage of that.”

Perez explained that the aim was to test the car in clean air, meaning he aimed to stay behind the pack with a significant gap. This strategy may explain why he let Colapinto overtake him in the pit lane. He said:

“The main goal for today was to be as far back as possible, to get as much clean air as possible.

“That was the goal.

“I think we managed to understand the car with the changes we’ve made. I think there’s room to improve what we have to do going forward.

“We have to try to get a bit more balance in the car.”