Featured Image Credit: Sky Sports F1
Topics: Red Bull Racing, Formula 1, Max Verstappen
Marcus Chan
Christian Horner issued a blunt nine-word response to Sergio Perez's howler at the Qatar Grand Prix.
Last weekend, Horner was in a celebratory mood as Max Verstappen clinched his fourth Formula 1 world title by finishing in fifth place at the Las Vegas Grand Prix.
However, Horner was brought straight back down to earth after Red Bull Racing driver Perez had an afternoon to forget at the Losail Circuit.
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The Mexican was knocked out in SQ1 and had to start from the pit lane after his car was worked on during parc ferme.
As the race began, replays showed that Perez was overtaken immediately by Williams' Franco Colapinto, who also started from the pits.
The Argentine drove around the Red Bull when the lights went green, with Perez seemingly slow to get away.
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When asked about the incident, Horner said: "I don’t know, to be honest. I need to have a chat with him about it. It looked like he just misjudged it."
He then delivered a nine-word assessment, saying: "When the light goes out, you’re supposed to go."
The Red Bull team boss added: "We got a bit of data out of it. There was no chance we were going to score any points, so we may as well use that session to get something out of it. So we changed the wing, we tried something a bit different, which gives us and the engineers some good information for the qualifying a little bit later."
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Luckily for Perez, he did produce a much-improved performance in qualifying as he placed his Red Bull in P9 ahead of Sunday afternoon's race.
However, that is still a long way off Verstappen, who managed to secure pole position before being demoted after receiving a one-place grid penalty for driving too slowly.
With the 2024 season coming to a close, there have been reports that Perez could be replaced by Red Bull ahead of the 2025 campaign due to his poor form.
The likes of Yuki Tsunoda, Liam Lawson and Colapinto have all been tipped to be a potential replacement for the Mexican.
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Recently, the 34-year-old said: "I think, at the end of the day, the team has all the information, there is so much I can say here.
"There’s a reason why we extended my contract during the year, and the team has everything [they need to know]. We exactly know where we are in terms of performance, in terms of issues, difficulties that we’ve had.
"We are a team and we know exactly internally where everything stands, so we’re working really hard as a team to come through and get back into a much better season than the one that we just had."