Sergio Perez adamant recent F1 struggles “different” to last year’s slump

Sergio Perez believes his recent slump in F1 form is completely “different” to his loss of form last year.

After winning two of the opening four races in 2023, Perez’s form fell apart.

The Mexican went on a horrendous run of qualifying displays, failing to make Q3 in five consecutive races.

His downturn in performance coincided with a return to Europe - something that has happened again this year.

Perez has insisted that his difficulties of late are not related to the ones he faced last year.

“Yeah they're different,” Perez told media including Crash.net. “We're in a much better place with the car, our understanding of things. Last year we tried to compensate too many things with the set-up.

“We just made quite a bit worse. I believe we're in a much better situation and [better] understanding of the situation so the way the issues have happened in the last few events has just put us on the backfoot in the last few events.”

Perez crashed out of the Canadian Grand Prix and was subsequently handed a penalty for returning to the pit lane in an unsafe manner.

The former Racing Point driver revealed that during the break between races, Red Bull identified “a lot of issues” Perez had with the car setup.

“Yeah after the weekend we found a lot of issues that we had,” Perez added. “It's a weekend we can get rid of [write-off] as we didn't have just one issue. At the time we thought we had one issue when we looked after, there were a couple more issues. So just a bad weekend overall, just looking back to where we can be here.

“We've been working very hard the last few days back in the factory. We've got a pretty good understanding of things. in Formula 1 we live in a world of such small margins that a few things haven't been in the right spot.

“But the good thing about is that, obviously it hurts a lot to have these bad run of races, but at same time it's great to be back and here in Barcelona to basically....I know if I can do a good race. I can get my momentum back that I had not long ago.”

Perez sits fifth in the drivers’ championship after nine rounds, 62 points behind teammate Max Verstappen.