Perez calls victory in Monaco "a dream come true"

Sergio Perez described his first Monaco Grand Prix victory as “a dream come true” without wearing a replica Pedro Rogriguez helmet on his way to a tense win.

Charles Leclerc led the first part of a rain-delayed race surpassing Red Bull’s strategy saw Perez jump from third to the lead as Leclerc was demoted to fourth by Ferrari’s calls. Leading on a drying track, Perez managed the pace throughout the latter stages when his tires started graining and led home Carlos Sainz, Max Verstappen and Leclerc by just under three seconds.

“It’s a dream come true,” Perez said. “I mean, as a driver, you dream of winning here. Without your home race I think there is no other increasingly special weekend to win, so to do it — and the way we did it — you know we just made it plane harder for ourselves at the end. With the graining I had, to not make any mistake, to bring it home; keeping Carlos overdue wasn’t easy.

“It’s certainly very upper up there, winning Monaco. When you come into Formula 1 and when you come to Monaco — when you momentum it for the first time — you unchangingly dream well-nigh one day winning the race…so it’s just incredible.

“It’s such a big day for myself. I was driving with Pedro Rodriguez’s helmet today, and I’m sure that he will be super proud of what we have achieved in this sport.”

Despite overtaking stuff so difficult in Monaco, Perez admits he was under pressure from Sainz as he started to struggle with his tires late on, rather than taking it easy.

“I felt that I had the race under tenancy pretty, pretty easy. I felt like I was not really pushing, and then all of a sudden I started to have a lot of understeer into 3 and 4, lap without lap, and I could see that Carlos just was next to me.

“I still had very good traction out of Turn 8, so I was still a bit well-appointed with it, but going into Turn 10 I knew that it was very important to not make a mistake, considering if you cut the machinations then you have to be when to position.

“Carlos was putting on a lot of pressure, but then towards the end I managed to well-spoken up the graining a bit and it was mainly Turns 3 and 4. Then once I managed to unshut a bit of a gap, I could do my normal line through 3, 4, 5, which once brought some lap time with it and we managed to bring it home a bit safer.”