Marko criticises Perez for being on ‘summer break mode’

Red Bull advisor Dr Helmut Marko has criticised Sergio Perez for his performance at the Hungarian Grand Prix weekend, claiming that he is on “summer break mode”.

Perez failed to advance past Q2 at the Hungaroring on Saturday, with his outing compromised firstly by having his lap time mistakenly deleted.

On his final push lap of the session, he came across Haas’ Kevin Magnussen at Turn 2 and failed to recover the lost time.

“It was very unfortunate with the track limits, I got it [the time] back,” Perez said. 

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“Then going into Turn 2, I found Kevin right on the line and I had to avoid him. I went very deep into the corner, and lost a couple of tenths which I couldn’t recover later on.”

However, Marko says that prior to the qualifying session, Perez was too far behind Verstappen all through the practice sessions, asserting that he will sit down with the Mexican to discuss his performances.

“He is too far behind Max Verstappen at the moment,” the Austrian told Sky Sport Germany.

“He was struggling in all the practice sessions, so we will have to sit down with each other. The summer break hasn’t started yet, but he already seems to be in that mode.

“We need to speak to him and he needs to stick to Verstappen’s set-ups and be there from first practice.

“If you’re a second slower in first free practice, you don’t catch up. We saw that in some races last year as well.

“We managed to eradicate that then, so we have to make sure we counter that again.”