Max Verstappen, Sergio Perez, Red Bull, 2024

Sergio Perez says being Max Verstappen’s team mate is made more difficult by the environment within Red Bull’s team.

The pair drove alongside each other at Red Bull between 2021 and 2024. Verstappen won all four championships across those seasons but increasingly dominated Perez during that time.

In 2023, Verstappen won 19 races to Perez’s two. Last year Perez went win-less and ended the season with 152 points to Verstappen’s 437.

Red Bull handed Perez a new two-year contract in June last year, but dropped him at the end of the season for Liam Lawson. He lasted just two rounds before Red Bull replaced him with Yuki Tsunoda, but neither have been any closer to Verstappen than Perez was.

Perez says he understands the difficulty of the situation they find themselves in. “I don’t like criticising the drivers that [have] been there because I was in that position, I know what exactly they’re going through,” he told Sky.

“The minute I signed my exit with Red Bull when we came to an agreement, I [thought] ‘that poor guy who comes here’. Because I managed to survive but it’s a very difficult place.”

Verstappen’s performance over the past four seasons has made him one of the most successful drivers of all time. Perez said he would be a tough driver to go up against in any environment but within Red Bull it is even harder.

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“Obviously being next to Max is very difficult, but being next to Max in Red Bull is something people don’t understand,” he said. “There’s so many things that I could tell you about it.

“But it’s simply just a very difficult job for a driver. There is no driver that can survive there. It doesn’t matter if you bring a Hamilton or a Leclerc – whoever you bring there is going to struggle massively.”

One explanation for the difficulties Verstappen’s team mates have experienced at Red Bull is that he can tolerate a car which is much more prone to oversteer than others, and they find a car developed in line with his preferences hard to handle. Perez said that makes it hard to drive Red Bull’s car naturally.

“It’s a very unique driving style, you have to be constantly adapting to the needs of Max. It’s as simple as that.” he said.

“As a driver it makes it really difficult because you have to be thinking all the time how to drive it,” he added. “And when you are thinking all of the time about how to [drive] the car, you know what happens.”

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