Sergio Pérez started last year promisingly but then everything went downhill. As his season dissolved in a slew of on-track blunders, speculation about his future naturally followed. Publicly at least, Red Bull is standing by its man…
WORDS ALEX KALINAUCKAS PICTURES
When Sergio Pérez spoke those words he was sitting just one point off the 2023 Formula 1 standings lead. He’d just won in Jeddah, his first victory of what was a fresh season. Two races later, leaving Azerbaijan, he was still only six points adrift and had matched Max Verstappen at 2-2 in the grand prix victory stakes.
Come the campaign’s conclusion, Pérez occupied the same spot in the standings. But the gap to his victorious team-mate was a Formula 1 record 290 points. Perez didn’t win again after Baku, while Verstappen racked up 17 more victories on his way to another record-setting season total. Perhaps more damningly, Max’s solo points haul would have been enough for Red Bull to beat Mercedes to second in the constructors’ championship.
The differences keep coming simply because they were so many and so massive. But what really went wrong for Pérez in 2023 – and can he avoid these pitfalls in the season about to start?
Well, for Red Bull team boss Christian Horner, Perez’s once-promising 2023 challenge took its most significant hit right after Baku: in Miami. On F1’s second visit to the Florida city, Verstappen turned ninth on the grid with Pérez on pole into a comprehensive defeat for his team-mate. Pérez later admitted he’d been too conservative on tyre management early on, while Verstappen was serenely climbing the order on a contra-strategy.
“The first four or five races he [Pérez] was very strong,” Horner explains. “And it was really after Miami [things went wrong] – I think that was a big, psychological blow for him, losing that race.”
POST-MIAMI VICES
The Miami race was hugely significant for two reasons. The first was the obvious points swing to Verstappen, who was simply never again under pressure points-wise as he had been on arrival. The other was what it did for Pérez’s confidence. Next up, in Monaco, he crashed hard in Q1.
Horner says the “momentum that he built up” winning in Jeddah and Baku, “by the time we headed into Europe, it started to disintegrate”.
“Confidence is such a vital thing in this sport,” Horner adds of the element that has a particular pertinence in qualifying flying laps. On this front, following the Monaco round, Pérez
