Red Bull reveal “pain” of issue-hit Perez running

Red Bull head of race engineering Guillaume Rocquelin has revealed the team feels "pain" after reliability problems limited Sergio Perez's track time on Thursday.

Max Verstappen completed an uninterrupted 147 laps on the first day of the F1 test at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya but on day two, Perez was not so fortunate.

The Mexican caused the first red flag of the three-day test after his Red Bull stopped on track in the morning session and was limited to just 38 laps with a further 40 added in the afternoon.

“Checo got up to speed pretty quickly this morning and his feedback is pretty much the same as Max’s, which means we know where we are going and everything is fairly settled," explained Rocquelin.

"Every time the car comes back to the garage we’re making changes and fine-tuning the direction so, all in all, I’m happy.

"We had a small issue today, which meant we lost around half a day’s running but we aren’t particularly worried about the problem itself, it is just a pain that we lost that time.

"However, it shouldn’t affect things in the long-term, as we have a solid platform and we’re happy with the progress we’re making.”

Despite his limited running, Perez determined he took "some good learnings" and was "pleased" with this.

He added: "We are trying some very different things and we have a lot of information to work through, so I think in the meetings it is important to go in-depth and give the engineers as much feedback as possible.

"The issue with the gearbox took a little bit longer to fix than we expected, but it is fine, it’s expected that these things happen at testing. I’ll be back in the car tomorrow and I hope the weather stays dry."

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