Max Verstappen and Red Bull 'annoyed' as Sergio Perez blamed for delighting F1 rivals
The weekends of Red Bull team-mates Sergio Perez and Max Verstappen could hardly have gone any differently in Monaco.
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Max Verstappen's Red Bull camp will have been left 'annoyed' over the Monaco Grand Prix weekend, according to Mercedes engineer Andrew Shovlin. Sergio Perez's crash in qualifying saw his RB19 hoisted into the air, exposing crucial design secrets to the rest of the F1 grid.
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Red Bull have been well and truly dominant so far in 2023, with Verstappen and Perez winning all six Grands Prix on offer between them. As the ground-effect design era takes shape, Mercedes and Ferrari have been left in the dust.
Their quest to catch up was given a healthy boost on Saturday after Perez's crash in qualifying. With his RB19 subsequently lifted into the air, pictures quickly circulated on social media showing the complex underside of the team's lightning-fast F1 car.
Verstappen went on to win the race, but Mercedes trackside engineering director Shovlin believes that the qualifying ordeal will have frustrated his team.
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"I suspect they’re probably more annoyed at their car being left in the sky than we would be about ours [after Lewis Hamilton's crash in FP3," he told Autosport. "With these regulations, the most important bit [of the car] is the bit you don’t normally get to see. The teams will be all over those kinds of photographs. Monaco is a good opportunity to get that kind of shot."
While Verstappen put in a stunning qualifying lap and converted his pole position into a Grand Prix win on Sunday, Perez was left unable to work his way through the pack, finishing down in 16th after being lapped twice by his team-mate.
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To make matters worse, F1 pundit Ted Kravitz placed the blame squarely on Perez's shoulders for exposing Red Bull's secretive floor design, which he described as a 'thing of beauty'. "Thanks to Perez, the whole of F1 has seen the fabled Red Bull floor," Kravitz told Sky Sports.
"See for yourself - it is a thing of wonder and beauty. Especially when you compare it to the floor of the Mercedes and the Ferrari, which we also saw up on cranes. They look prehistoric. Even the little guide fences have got guide fences of their own, on the Red Bull!
"It’s so complex in three dimensions. There are elements coming down, curling round, circles where the vortex starts and the vortices is generated midway through the floor. Then, what they’re doing with the area under the crash structure, and the gearbox…
"I tell you, when you look at these pictures, compare them to the Mercedes and the Ferrari, it is no wonder that the RB19 is so good. They will hate it, of course. But, hey, blame Perez! Not our fault that we can see."
