Checo Pérez has served his punishment on wheels. The Mexican driver has found the light after three races in which he was stuck due to his mistakes on the track. Now, at the Austrian Grand Prix, he arrived sick in the days before the race. He made mistakes that led him to start from fifteenth place. He played, for the umpteenth time in his career at Red Bull, climb positions from beyond the middle table to try to reach a place on the podium. With everything stacked against him, the Mexican put his foot down full throttle to take the podium in third place, behind Charles Leclerc and winner Max Verstappen.
Track marshals stole the spotlight at the Austrian Grand Prix. They were the ones who were in charge of embittering the pilots by constantly penalizing them for going over the limits of the track. Checo Pérez faced a horror in qualifying as he was eliminated in the second qualifying round. In that Q2, the Mexican had three laps erased for not staying on the track. bad result. The man from Guadalajara was able to find solace when he finished second in the sprint race with a high-tension brush with Verstappen.
Pérez played with the desperation of a Hamilton who earned a punishment for leaving the track on more than three occasions. The Briton put pressure on the Mexican by questioning at each step on lap 10 that he was exceeding the limits of the track. The Mexican was well freed from any penalty. What he had to do was be more skilled than McLaren’s Lando Norris and Carlos Sainz, with whom he had a tough fight on the asphalt for that third place. When Pérez overtook him, the Spaniard wanted to find a loophole so that he would be penalized. Nothing to do, third place was already tricolor. “Well done, Checo, good comeback!” Christian Horner, the Red Bull boss, congratulated him, the same one who knocked him out for making a mistake in the qualifying round. “Physically I was very weak, I had a fever, I couldn’t sleep,” the pilot admitted. “It is always a pleasure to compete against a Ferrari, it was a great comeback. Hopefully, now yes, we have returned [a los planos estelares]”, he added after the race.
In the race, the Mexican found a good rhythm on the track, the same one he had lost more than a month ago since the crash in qualifying for the Monaco Grand Prix when he crashed into the barriers. In Spain he nabbed a struggling fourth place and in Canada he stalled in sixth place. Pérez returns to the ring and continues behind Verstappen, who is aiming for the three-time championship. Red Bull, which ran its headquarters in Austria, rejoices in the lead in the constructors’ championship.
The 31 podiums of Checo Pérez in Formula 1
Sergio Pérez’s record grows. El Guadalajara reached his twenty-ninth podium in Formula 1. He celebrates six victories: Shakhir 2020, Baku in 2021, Monaco and Singapore in 2022; Saudi Arabia and again Azerbaijan 2023). In addition to 12 second places (Malaysia and Italy in 2012, Turkey in 2020, Australia, Imola, Spain, Baku, Great Britain, Belgium and Japan in 2022, plus second place in Bahrain and Miami in 2023) and 13 third places (Canada, in 2012; Bahrain, in 2014; Russia, in 2015, Monaco and Baku in 2016 and 2018, at the Grand Prix of France, Turkey, the United States, Mexico City in 2021 and 2022, Abu Dhabi in 2022 and in Austria in 2023).
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