Perez “struggling the most” at Silverstone after spin in F1 sprint

Running in seventh-place behind Fernando Alonso and Lando Norris, Perez spun on the exit of the high-speed Becketts corner, damaging his car but narrowly avoiding the barriers.

The Mexican managed to keep his Red Bull car going into the penultimate lap, until the team called him to retire.

Red Bull has since confirmed that Perez will start from the pit lane, allowing it to take his car out of parc ferme conditions and make changes to it ahead of Sunday’s grand prix.

Reflecting on his spin in the sprint race, Perez said: “Yes, that was pretty much it coming out of the corner already picking up quite a lot of throttle. I think I got caught out in the dirty air and that made things hard. I became a passenger, basically, really early in the corner. A poor day from my side.”

He won in Azerbaijan and finished third in France, but failed to finish on the podium in the previous two rounds in Austria.

Perez admitted that he’s “struggling the most” at Silverstone in terms of pure performance.

“I have been basically getting the developments slowly through the year,” Perez added. “I think it has been difficult from the Friday point of view but the pace has been there from Saturday to Sunday. Like from Austria I and Austria II everything would have looked very different without the incidents. Probably here is a place where we have been struggling the most.

“I struggled a lot with the dirty air and I don’t know if it is related to lighter fuel loads starting or something like that but I did struggle in the dirty air at the start of the race.”