Perez: Poor qualifying "simply where we are"

Force India look to be one of the teams struggling most coming into the opening round of 2018.

Sergio Perez reflected on what was a poor qualifying performance from Force India as the maximum the team could perform at the moment. A lowly 13th and 15th on the grid for himself and teammate Estaban Ocon respectively looks to confirm that the team have gone backwards over the winter break.

They will gain one position each due to Valtteri Bottas' crash in Q3 meaning the Mercedes driver is likely to start from the pitlane, but Perez acknowledged the team were behind where they thought they would be.

“It’s definitely behind where we expected to be,” said Perez. “We thought we were going to be a bit closer to the fight, but we simply were not.

"It’s a shame, but the season is long, and hopefully we can recover the pace of the car.

“That’s what we’ve got at the moment, I think that lap and the balance I had was pretty strong, so unfortunately there is not something that we can fix quickly, it’s simply where we are.

"We have been in this position before. Normally we are not the best team in Melbourne, but hopefully we can be the best one out of the rest by the time we are in Abu Dhabi.

“It’s a long season ahead of us, there are prospects coming up, so tomorrow it’s a race where if we make it to the finish line, we have a good strategy, and hopefully we can get some points.”

Despite a lack of upgrades compared to some of their rivals, there are reports that the team are running the same front wing they ran in Singapore in 2017, Perez remained optimistic about what Force India could achieve on Sunday and throughout the season.

I’m optimistic, I’m looking forward to it. The lap that I did today makes me smile from the bad day we had, but I know there is a long season ahead of us, and this has just started, so there’s plenty of races to go.”

“Last year we were not great either here, there will be some tracks that will suit us more and last year it did come more towards us later in the season.

"So it’s not over yet, there’s 20 races to go and a race tomorrow, so we try to get the most here and come back stronger in the next race.

“If we look at ourselves, the package did bring a performance gain, so that was a good step in practice, now we need some more to fight with the one in front.

"On our pure development, we did a good job this weekend, we just need a bit more now.”