The 33-year-old was forced to start from the pit lane on Sunday after a collision with Esteban Ocon and Nico Hulkenberg in Saturday’s sprint race destroyed the sidepods on his RB19.
While trying to scrap his way through the field Perez picked up three separate time penalties and was lapped by his team-mate Max Verstappen, who became a three-time world champion after the sprint race incident.
With penalties applied Perez could only manage a P10 finish, ending the race behind Alfa Romeo Zhou Guanyu, who started from the back of the grid but, unlike Checo, managed to keep it clean.
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Horner discussed Checo’s weekend with the Sky Sports F1 team after the race. “I think we really need to sit down with Checo because we know what he’s capable of and he’s not hitting that form at the moment,” he explained.
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“We desperately need him to find that form to keep this second place in the championship. So, it was frustrating that he’s only come out of the weekend with one point and I think he could have, even starting from the back of the grid, there was an opportunity to score heavily today or decently.
“But we’ll support him as much as we can because there’s the triple-header coming up. There’s a huge amount of points with sprint races as well.”
Horner did, however, admit that the Mexican’s trip to the Doha desert was one to forget. “Checo Perez has had a bit of a shocker of a race,” he said. “He’s had a horrible weekend, the incident yesterday.
“And then, unfortunately, the three penalties that he got in the race. Without those penalties, when you add 15 seconds to his time, suddenly he’s a lot further up the points scoring on a day that Lewis didn’t score, so it was a missed opportunity to really try and cement that second place.
Thankfully for Perez, Hamilton didn’t make any gains on him in the Drivers’ Championship standings with the Red Bull driver increasing his advantage by a single point to 30 with five races remaining on the calendar.