Perez: We managed to control the course of the race

Sergio Pérez won the Azerbaijan Grand Prix for the second time in his career, adding to his success in Saturday’s sprint. He was very confident in Sunday’s race, in which he was ahead of Max Verstappen and managed to hold onto first position until the finish.

Sergio Perez (1st): “Today everything turned out well for us! We were able to stay in the DRS zone, kept putting pressure on Max and in my opinion we managed to outperform him in the first part of the race. Even then everything looked good, but then the safety car came out, and we can say that after that the next race started, but already on hard tyres.

I think my partner and I were about the same speed. Today we both gave our best, both hitting the barriers several times, as we attacked at the limit of what was possible. Max was very actively pushing me, but we managed to control the course of the race.

For example, on one of the laps in turn 15 I hit the bump stop quite hard, but was lucky that the right front tire survived.

Max Verstappen (2nd): “We had some bad luck, the safety car came on track at the wrong time. I tried to stay as close to Sergio as possible so I could use DRS, but this caused the tires to overheat. This happens when you are closely following another car.

But it was hard for me to do laps at a steady pace and I tried to do something by changing the settings that I could influence. Finally, when I found out, I managed to ride pretty well for the last ten laps, but it was already too late.

However, during the race we collected a lot of useful information and of course the team achieved an excellent result. I don’t know how events will develop in the next stages of the season, but the championship is long and in each race everything can develop in its own way. In Miami everything will be completely different from Baku, and not like on other tracks.

You have to keep learning, because you can’t do every race perfectly, but on days like today you gain valuable experience.”