“I think the development of the car has been… I haven’t been as comfortable with it as I was in the beginning, let’s put it that way,” said Perez here in Austria yesterday. “I think I’ve got some work to do to understand what’s going on and hopefully have a more straightforward weekend here.
“It’s just going away from me in terms of how comfortable I was in the beginning. But saying that, I’ve had only two races of this and last weekend I wasn’t up to it, I was feeling pretty bad, so I think this is the first weekend where I will see, really.”
He seems to be back in the support role Red Bull has always envisioned for him, but which he had briefly transcended. Even with his difficulties he’s more than able to form a great support in a car as competitive as this. But he’s surely yearning to recapture that brief golden period where he could go into a race weekend feeling he could compete even with his team mate. Getting back to that place might be a receding dream. Let’s see.