Red Bull's Sergio Perez has said that he and his team will have to figure out why he wasn't able to find more pace on the soft compound Pirellis during second practice. Perez finished the day six tenths away from what teammate Max Verstappen could do on the soft tyre, once the team switched away from the medium compound for their qualifying simulation. It was only a very marginal improvement from what Perez had managed on the mediums. As a result, Perez said the key to figuring out the rest of the weekend will be unlocking the performance of the tyre. "Basically, it's very similar to where we were last year, tarmac wise," Perez told media, including RacingNews365. "It's very hard, getting the tyres to work in these conditions is not easy. So, I think the main focus will be to understand what's going on with the tyres. I think that the pace on the medium was good. "But then, when we went out to the soft, we didn't find any lap time so we have to analyse what went wrong on that side and hopefully sort it out for qualifying." Having qualified on the front row last time out at Imola, Perez is confident that he can at least join in the fight this time out, thanks to the pace shown by Verstappen. "I think we have pretty good pace," he explained. So definitely we should be in the mix tomorrow to fight for pole." With Red Bull running an updated floor on the RB16B this weekend, Perez said the track conditions meant it was very difficult to be able to feel any real difference. "[It's] very different the track you know," the Mexican explained, "very hard to feel anything around here. Everything just feels a bit worse, a bit less grip overall so very hard to compare."
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