Red Bull's Sergio Perez has explained the reason for his late spin on Thursday in Bahrain, after the Mexican brought out the red flags. The stoppage was sufficiently close to the end of the session for the decision to be taken not to resume the action, costing everyone about six minutes of track time. Having logged 138 laps of the circuit, the clear winner of Thursday's mileage battle between the teams, Perez was circulating slowly on track when he lost the rear of his RB18 coming out of Turn 8 and ended up with his rear wheels beached in the gravel. "Towards the end of the day, after the [Virtual] Safety Car, I had cold tyres and just lost it and unfortunately went into the gravel," Perez explained after the session. "It ended the session early, so hopefully everyone can have a nice rest now!" Despite the issue, Perez was pleased with how his day went, despite only finishing 10th in the standings. "It was a very productive day, we did plenty of laps and gathered a lot of information," he said. "It was good to get a read on the car on a different track with higher temperatures. It's obviously very different here compared to Barcelona. Bahrain is one of the roughest circuits on the calendar, so you are naturally more rear-biased. "In general, we had a good pace and we have plenty of information to go through – there is so much to learn at the moment."
Red Bull "not focusing on pace"
With Perez not putting in any attention-grabbing times during the day, Red Bull's Head of Race Engineering, Guillaume Rocquelin, confirmed that there's still no intent from the team to chase lap time. "We had a good day today; in one day we did the amount of mileage we would usually carry out across an entire race weekend," he commented. "That means being able to gauge the reliability of parts across the race weekend in one day and we are in a good place. A few things fell away here and there, but there was no massive time lost in the garage due to big issues. "We were not focused on pace today and we ran a programme we felt would be useful to learn from, so we're really pleased that we managed to get through so much work. "As we have ticked the box of race distance today, it may not be as critical tomorrow, so we will still do fairly long runs, but maybe not with pit-stops. Every day we are learning more and getting better."
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