A fuel pump issue prevented Sergio Perez from partaking in Chinese Grand Prix sprint qualifying, with the Cadillac driver lamenting a problem the nascent Formula 1 team has had for “far too long”.
Perez’ free practice running was hampered by a fuel system problem in Melbourne, with similar trouble taking team-mate Valtteri Bottas out of the Australian Grand Prix.
Perez covered just 13 laps in the only practice session at Shanghai, spending the latter part of the action in the garage. It emerged his MAC-26 was suffering from the aforementioned problem, which ruled him out of sprint qualifying.
“Yeah, it was a fuel pump issue,” the Mexican commented. “Unfortunately, we’ve been struggling in that area already for a long time, far too long, so it is very frustrating. We haven’t been able to solve it, and it’s been already a lot of times that we’ve been with that issue.”
Asked whether the team would be able to fix it for Saturday’s sprint, Perez replied: “I don’t know. I think obviously the team is working really hard back at home as well, and we’ll see if they’re able to fix it or not. We had the same issue this morning, so the running has been very limited so far. Hopefully we are able to do it.
“We’ve been having this sort of issue since the testing started, so we haven’t come up with a solution, and I really hope that soon we can have it.”
Meanwhile, Bottas qualified 21st and last, with a substantial 1.8s gap to the lead Aston Martin, while he was more than three seconds away from the Q2 cut-off time.
Valtteri Bottas, Cadillac Racing
Photo by: Sam Bagnall / Sutton Images via Getty Images
However, the Finn was hampered by a ‘significant deployment issue’, leading him to describe sprint qualifying as “a bit of a waste of a session”.
“It’s quite difficult to say where we would have ended up [without the problem],” he added.
Cadillac chief technical officer Nick Chester admitted to “a difficult day”, with his cars finding themselves on the back row of the grid for the sprint.
“At this early stage in our journey we are still finding issues and fixing them in real time,” Chester added.
“We were unable to set representative times. All the same, every lap we do gives us more valuable information that lets us move forward.”
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