After the Malaysian Gp today, Force India driver Sergio Perez is adamant his collision with Romain Grosjean at Sepang was a racing incident and did not warrant a penalty.
While fighting for position with the Lotus driver, Perez tagged Grosjean and put him into a high-speed spin. Of course Grosjean was unhappy about the incident and complained to his team while minutes later the stewards launched an investigation.
The outcome of that was a 10-second stop-go for the Mexican driver, who finished down in 13th place.
In an interview after the race today, Perez has said that he feels the incident wasn’t his fault and that the penalty didn’t help his race as a result of that.
‘The penalty didn’t help us; I felt I had nowhere to go and couldn’t avoid contact with Romain. I thought it was a racing incident but it ended up costing us a lot.’
Even though the penalty didn’t help Perez and his race and I understand his perspective on the incident, I do feel that the penalty given to him was correct as I felt that he didn’t Grosjean enough room and he was lucky not have to caused damage to his car and also to Grosjean’s car too.
Further on in his interview, Perez believes that tyre degradation also played a role in his lack of points today. Perez added the following:-
‘We knew ahead of the race it would be a big fight to get close to the points and it turned out to be just the case. I struggled with degradation in my first stint, on mediums, and that cost me a lot of time after the Safety Car.
‘We had slightly better pace with the hard compound, but in the end it was not enough to get back in contention. It’s a disappointing result but at least we were able to learn a lot from this race and this will help us going forward.’
Despite everything, Perez knew that it would be hard for him and the Force India team to have scored points this weekend in Malaysia. With Perez struggling with tyre wear during the race and then the penalty, this was bound to impact on his performance, even though Perez and Force India have struggled to get pace and performance out of the car all weekend let’s not forget.
But overall as Perez says himself in his interview after the race; all he can do is take this result on the chin so to speak, learn his lessons from this weekend and use this as motivation to go forward in China in two weeks time where he will hopefully be able to add to his points tally from Australia.
Jones on F1 