Sergio Perez is often hailed as the king of street circuits. However, going by his last weekend in Monaco, the circuit turned out to be quite a handful. On Saturday, during the Q1 session of qualifying, he failed to hold his horses in one of the corners and crashed hard into the barriers. That ruined his chances of landing on the podium as he started the race from the back of the grid. The race was an embarrassing one as well as his teammate, Max Verstappen, lapped him twice. The Mexican Minister of Defence apologized to his team in the post-race radio message. Team boss, Christian Horner, was, however, sympathetic towards his driver and urged him to put the bad outing behind him.

Perez’s last outing in 2022 was quite an eventful one. He may have won the race, but conspiracies over foul play came to the fore. The Mexican crashed into the barriers during Q3, right before his teammate was about to go out on his final flying lap. The incident caused the session to be red-flagged. That incident, many believe, was the reason behind Max defying team orders in Brazil in 2022 to let Perez pass.

Christian Horner backs Sergio Perez to come back stronger in Barcelona

The Barcelona circuit is more open and has longer straights than the one in Monaco. That suits perfectly to the Red Bull car. Given how badly Perez performed in Monaco, things can only go up from here. Horner believes it and so does he.

In the post-race radio conversation, Perez said, “What a weekend. I’m sorry, it was all my fault.”

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Horner: Hard luck, Checo. That was a tough weekend for you. So, put it behind you. Next week, Barcelona.

Perez: Yeah, well done there for Max’s race, anyway. But yeah, it was all my fault. Sorry to the whole team and we will be back to our level in Barcelona.

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Verstappen had quite the opposite outing. Barring a couple of nervous incidents, the Dutchman drove a near-perfect race despite other drivers struggling to keep their cars on the track during the rain.

Max Verstappen describes how tough he found the race to be

Verstappen may have maintained the lead on 2nd placed Fernando Alonso right from the start but it certainly wasn’t easy. For the first few moments of the race, he found it difficult to get a grip while Alonso had plenty of it. Later, he touched the barrier, making the advertisement scrape off of it. Thankfully, he did not take any damage from the incident.

Describing his struggles while speaking post-race with David Coulthard, Verstappen said, “It was quite a difficult one because we were on the medium and Fernando was on the hard. We didn’t want to go that long but we had to stay out with the rain coming.”

“The tires were graining and then the pace picked up a little bit but it was still very tricky to drive. Then it started to rain and we had to make the call to go onto the interest,” he added. “It was incredibly slippery and when you are that far in the lead you don’t want to push to hard but also you don’t want to lose too much time so it’s quite difficult in that scenario. I clipped the wall a few times and it was super difficult out there. But that’s Monaco.”

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While the Spanish GP circuit plays well into Red Bull’s strengths, the threat from Ferrari could be very real. That is because the Maranello team is planning on fielding their next set of big upgrades in Barcelona.