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Red Bull advisor Helmut Marko said that Sergio Perez's potential replacement and VCARB driver Liam Lawson did a good job at the 2024 US Grand Prix Sprint shootout on Friday. The Kiwi driver failed to make it out of the SQ2 session after his best lap could only get him P12. However, that lap time was deleted due to track limit violations, pushing him to 15th.
Lawson, who is replacing Daniel Ricciardo for the remainder of the 2024 season, has never driven at the Circuit of the Americas previously in his career and looked just a bit behind his teammate Yuki Tsunoda throughout the day.
Speaking to PlanetF1 on October 19, Marko was impressed by the 22-year-old's performance after the Sprint Shootout and said:
“No, he did basically a very good job. He was unlucky with track limits, so he was eliminated in P12, but in SQ1 he was faster than Yuki. He never has been on this track, so it’s OK."
Liam Lawson is touted to be in the running for a Red Bull seat next year and replacing Sergio Perez. The Mexican driver had another tough day at the office as Marko gave his assessment of Sergio Perez's SQ2 exit and added:
“He was qualifying with the soft tyre. He said he had no grip on the tyre, we have to check why that is. But it will be difficult from P11 to finish in the points.”
Sergio Perez analyzes his P11 finish at the Sprint Shootout on Friday
Red Bull driver Sergio Perez said he was "frustrated" as he failed to make progress in the SQ2 after SQ1 and bowed out of the session after being almost a second behind teammate Max Verstappen.
As quoted by F1.com, the 34-year-old detailed his difficulties with the tires and the car control at high speeds:
“Today was very frustrating, especially from SQ1 to SQ2, we didn’t have any progression and if anything, we took a step back with the tires - that made things a lot trickier. I am struggling too much early on in the lap, through sector one and we need to look at that. I think I am suffering quite a bit with ride issues in high speed and that’s something we also need to look into," Perez said.
Further, the Mexican expressed hope of working on the issues ahead of the qualifying sessions to better prepare for the main race at Austin.
"Hopefully we can learn quite a bit today from the car and make sure in qualifying tomorrow that we are able to put it together. We still have some work to do for the rest of the weekend, the main target is to be strong in the race and our long run pace looked very promising this morning,” he added.
Sergio Perez would look to make progress in the Sprint race on Saturday and finish in the top eight in attempts to score some points in the session.
