Force India rejects new front wing in Bahrain

The Silverstone-based team had one version of the new front wing, which was given to Perez thanks to him being classified higher than team-mate Esteban Ocon in the world championship.

But after using it on a difficult Friday for the team, it was not used again in Bahrain as the data showed it was not performing well even though it did not change the feel of the car for Perez.

"We are not using it," said Perez when asked by Autosport about the front wing.

"We reversed out of it because we thought it was not working as well as we thought it was going to.

"It was purely data-driven, such a small thing that it's difficult for me to see what's going on."

Perez qualified 12th for the Bahrain Grand Prix, with both of his runs compromised by battery power deployment trouble.

This left him 0.147s off Ocon, who became the first Force India driver this season to reach Q3.

"I aborted my second Q1 run quite late, which meant that I was very low on pack [power]," Perez said.

"So I had to push quite hard to get the pack back, which I didn't get so I lost a lot of deployment.

"I could have made it into Q3 [on the second run], but then once again we had another issue with the deployment."

Team-mate Ocon was ninth fastest in qualifying, 1.916s off Sebastian Vettel's pole time.

He paid tribute to the turnaround achieved by the team after struggling throughout Friday practice, which included making parts changes to the car.

"That was a good achievement [making Q3] and the guys did a fantastic job changing all those parts and still managing to get a clear picture of the balance of the car," said Ocon.

"It was almost like two days of winter testing that we did in an hour-and-a-half.

"We managed to improve every session and take the most from the car in qualifying."