Sergio Perez has revealed his retirement from eighth place with two laps to go was due to brake failure.
In the post-race interviews he rued his luck, saying that “Reliability has hit us this weekend; yesterday with the suspension, today with the brakes”.
Perez told his team on the radio he had “no warning at all” of the upcoming failure, as he sailed through the braking zone at turn three into the barriers.
He continued, sounding downcast “It’s a shame because those points were in our pocket, we could have taken a good amount of points out of Williams today”.
Perez had managed to bring his car into a points paying position by running 43 laps on his final set of soft tyres and making use of his superior straight line speed to make a number of passes on track.
Force India had already retire his team mate Nico Hulkenberg with “critical” brake wear.
2016 Austrian Grand Prix
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F1fan
3rd July 2016, 23:01
Was wondering what happened to Perez it looked awkward that crash straight into the wall all by himself. Oh well he looked good up until that point. Shame for Hulk I was hoping Hulk finally got his 1st podium. Today the car had the reliability of a low budget car/Midfield car.
Alianora La Canta (@alianora-la-canta)
4th July 2016, 8:34
It is a low-budget car (only slightly higher budget than Sauber), so the surprise is that things like this happen as rarely as they do…
Nimba (@nimba)
4th July 2016, 18:05
While Perez has again displayed the fight he has within , he pushes just too hard and tops the speed trap almost everywhere, as a results his brakes take a lot of punishment and he has suffered many times due to them in the final laps on a Sunday. Still he has emerged as the better among the two force India drivers and clearly league ahead of Nico Hulkenberg whose promising talent has faded away in F1. Starting on the front row he was eaten up by the field like a tuna by a shark. Additionally he had an advantage when the safety car was deployed as he had pitted for fresh softs just before Vettel’s tyre wished him Happy Birthday, still he was not able to capitalize on that while Perez in a similar car was overtaking continuously through the race. If I’m hiring as a big team principal, I would not even include Hulkenberg on my short list, which would probably be headed by Perez.