Perez: Qatar was the worst weekend I remember

Following the highs of Jeddah and Baku, Perez's form started to plummet from Miami onwards when he started the race on pole, but got beaten by teammate Max Verstappen who won the race from ninth.

And Perez revealed that the Spanish Grand Prix was somehow a turning point to the worse, he single out Qatar as the worst weekend of his 2023 campaign qualifying 13th and finishing the race 80s behind Verstappen, who won of course.

Perez revealed that after Qatar, he head back to Red Bull Racing HQ at Milton Keynes and did some work with his engineers and in the simulator to try and understand his struggles and how to get over them.

Asked why he took that action after Qatar, Perez told Motorsport.com: "Because Qatar was really the worst weekend I remember in a while, probably my worst weekend ever in the sport.

"It was such a bad weekend that I really felt like: 'I cannot be this bad, there's something that's going on'," he declared.

"When you have these back-to-back races, I feel like sometimes there is not enough time to really go through it all. So, I felt like we really had to take a bit of time to make sure that we understood which way we were going.

"Obviously, we had a deficit within the car setup that we were playing around [with] weekend by weekend and we were just not able to progress through it.

"But once we managed to get on top of that, we understood a lot of things that we were trying to compensate for. And that just basically meant that we were not just not doing things right.

"I think that has been really, really good on our side. I mean, it was bad that it happened but in a way, it was really good because it really strengthened our team quite a lot," the Red Bull driver maintained.

Perez was under extreme pressure throughout 2023, with his future at Red Bull subject to speculation despite having a contract for 2024, and the fact that Daniel Ricciardo was called up to replace the underwhelming Nyck de Vries at AlphaTauri just pile the pressure more on the Mexican.

However, he insists that no matter how tough things were, he never contemplated quitting, he said: "That would have been the easiest route because it was very tough at times.

"But I'm not the type of guy that at this stage of my career will be giving up and be willing to finish my career like that. It's not something that I ever considered doing.

"I'm aware of the responsibility I have and I'm not the sort of guy that will blame people around me for the results. At the end of the day I took responsibility for it and I had to turn around the situation quite a lot," he added.

As for all the rumours putting Ricciardo in his seat, Perez said: "To be honest, I was not really thinking of it as a driver. I was more focused on making sure I could enjoy the weekends and be able to have that.

"I was having some weekends that were so difficult that they were not fun. I'm here because I still love what I'm doing and I'm here because I still have a lot of fun, a lot of enjoyment. And that was my main focus, that we really need things to turn them around.

"I had some really difficult times in a few months, let's put it that way. I went from fighting from the championship to being in a difficult boat, and not having that confidence with the car.

"But the end of the day, if you want to be at Red Bull, I'm aware of how strong mentally you have to be to be here. And it's something that I got stronger at. You learn so much from the bad days, much more than from the good days," he explained.

Perez somehow managed to improve in he final races of the season but admitted: "I always say people will only remember where you finish in Abu Dhabi, but I'm aware of the year I had.

"I think I've learned a lot and I'm happy with how we managed to turn our season around. We really came out of it stronger than before and made good use of those bad days," the 33-year-old concluded.