Sergio Perez’s difficult recent run continued in Las Vegas when he struggled with a lack of grip and failed to progress from Q1.
Perez and team mate Max Verstappen both found the Red Bull RB20 unsuited to the street track, with the lack of a low drag rear wing relative to rivals causing a compromise.
However while Verstappen was able to make it to Q3 and qualify fifth Perez fell at the first hurdle and had to settle for 16th.
“We’ve been lacking a lot of pace through the qualifying, and that’s been the main issue, really, for us,” said the Mexican.
“So it didn’t get any better. And in hindsight, we should have used two sets, given that we were not so competitive in Q1.
“The main struggle is really at low-speed with the tyres, that is where the main struggle comes from.
“I think just compromising the low-speed has been quite tricky. And then the sliding – I feel like if I slide a little bit too much one tyre, then I finish it.”
Expanding on his problems he said: “I think we got a fundamental issue at the moment with the car that is just not working for me, and it’s where the whole brain is going, to try and fix it up instead of being compromising.
“And at the moment we come to the weekends and we just explore a lot of things, and then it’s just a difficult one to make it work.
“It’s obviously not ideal. You want to be up there, especially when I know what I can do.
“But when you don’t have that grip underneath you, then it’s really hard, and you’re prone to a lot of mistakes and so on.”
Perez remains hopeful that the RB20 is better over a race distance.
“I think tomorrow is going to be a very tricky one,” he said. “So there’s a long race ahead. A lot of things will happen, and I believe that we are more competitive come races, because yesterday we looked a lot better over the long race than over a single lap.”
