In a recent interview, Sergio Perez amusedly mentioned Carlos Sainz's 2022 radio message to describe his progress at Red Bull.
During the 2022 British Grand Prix, Carlos Sainz was asked by his Ferrari team to give more space to his teammate Charles Leclerc at the safety car restart, to which he famously responded, "Please stop inventing."
The Spaniards eventually won that race. Regardless, this statement must have become an inside joke between F1 drivers in the meantime, as Sergio Perez recently casually dropped it during a press conference after the Japanese Grand Prix.
After the first four races of the season, Perez stands in second place, 13 points behind his Dutch teammate, and seems much more comfortable in the car than he did at the end of 2023. As to what changed, he said:
"Like Carlos [Sainz] would say, we stopped inventing. (laughs) We were playing around with the car far too much and just going through it and I think now we have a much better base. We are a lot happier, and the weekends just progress."
"I think when we came here last year, we were at the stage of our season where [nothing] was working. When you are in that, you just go around circles and circles. Then we found out in the end, towards the end of the year, that it was better."
Helmut Marko also recently revealed that the Mexican driver stopped experimenting too much with his setup, which seems to have helped him. Perez added:
"Just step back and don't try to chase it too much with the set-up, because then you start compromising other things, and I think that's been the case for this year."
"I'm a lot more comfortable, a lot happier and the confidence is slowly coming back. I think we just improved – we've got a better car."