Perez out in Sprint Race after contact with Hamilton: ‘Very unfortunate’

Sergio Perez had to to retire of the Sprint Race at Spa, after he and Hamilton made contact on Lap 6. The Mexican quickly dropped out of the point-paying positions and eventually had retire in the pit lane a couple of laps later.

Sergio Perez was running in P4, when the incident happened. "Basically he just tried to run out of grip and couldn't stop his car and just went on the side of me and damaged my floor. That was very unfortunate. I think he was in a bit of a hurry. Everyone was in a hurry to recover. Today it's a very short race, so you have to take those levels of risk. But yes, it's not nice to get my race ruined by him." the Red Bull driver explained what happened to GPblog among others.

He continued: "It was massive damage from the contact from Lewis. He just took the whole right-hand side of the car. He damaged the floor and the sideboard, so that was game over. We lost too much grip with it."

The Mexican also said they were on course to get a good result and the strategy was great. "Yes, it was looking great. The team had a great strategy to recover. We were about to get Gasly just before the safety car came out. It was looking great, but unfortunately it was just all too late."

Another chance on Sunday

Perez is determined to make up for the points he lost today. "Tomorrow we will know about the car really, where we really are. So I'm looking forward to that and hopefully we can recover the points we lost today. I want a strong result tomorrow and that will be the main target."