Sergio Perez dismisses the 'gamble' of starting the race on hard tires as a possible winning strategy

Sergio Perez does not believe that gambling the race start on hard tires would have proved beneficial for him in his battle against Max Verstappen at the Miami GP. While Perez had started the race from the pole position on medium tires, his Red Bull teammate Verstappen started the race in P9 but on hard tires.

In hindsight, it did appear that the hard tire did help Verstappen make his way through the field quicker than anticipated as he was able to close the gap with Perez in the first stint.

Quite a few drivers in the race benefited from using the alternate strategy but Perez does not think that it would have helped change the result in any which way.

Terming the alternate strategy a bit of a gamble, Sergio Perez said:

"No. When you are starting on pole, starting on the Hard is much more like a gamble that can go right or wrong with Safety Cars and, I think at the time, none of us were expecting the Medium to be… because pretty much the whole grid went for the Medium start, I think none of us realised how weak of a tyre it was. I think once we did a few laps on it, we realised that it was quite a poor tyre."

Sergio Perez's Red Bull teammate Max Verstappen pushed for the alternate strategy

Max Verstappen, on the other hand, admitted that he pushed for the strategy to start on hard tires.

Talking about the decision in the post-race press conference, Verstappen said:

"Yeah, this is something I wondered about already yesterday, together with my engineer. We were quite strongly opinionated on that already – then, of course, you have to discuss it with the team, with the strategists, and yeah, they were like: ‘OK. In terms of race time, it was very close between doing a Medium/Hard or Hard/Medium."

He added:

"It didn’t really matter. But, of course, when you start on the Hard, the risk is a bit higher because we only had one, so if you had a lap one puncture or whatever, then of course, our race is a bit tougher. But I was happy to take that gamble and do it the other way around."

Perez lost out to Verstappen in Miami and the championship deficit has increased to 14 points now. The battle between the two Red Bull drivers has been quite fascinating in the first few races, and it will be interesting to see what happens next.