How Perez kept Verstappen’s Saudi Arabian GP surge at bay

“You might as well start writing your report now, mate,” mutters Autosport F1 editor Matt Kew on the return from trackside wandering, as Max Verstappen flashes up on the paddock screens having eclipsed the rest of the field in FP1 by nearly half a second. Benched for Thursday’s media sessions after battling a stomach bug, Verstappen rocked up to the Jeddah Corniche Circuit fashionably late and fired off a trio of hammer blows to the rest of the field by headlining the full set of practice sessions. Few in the paddock had any optimism that the race would be anything other than a foregone conclusion and yet, somehow, fate had its own funny way of intervening.

Come the end of Sunday’s race, Sergio Perez is the man standing on the middle step of the podium having largely dominated proceedings in Saudi Arabia, while Red Bull team-mate Verstappen had to dip into his back catalogue and perform a sterling recovery drive to rescue second after a mechanical issue knocked the wind from his sails in qualifying.

Across the three practice sessions, Verstappen’s margins over second place were 0.483s, 0.208s, and 0.613s. Thus, it seemed to everyone around the paddock that Saturday and Sunday were set for another Verstappen display of crushing dominance, all but dispelling the hope that 2023’s settled ruleset could offer a closer championship fight. Instead, a faulty driveshaft denied Verstappen another pole position, dumping him out of qualifying in a lowly 15th place and handing Perez the whip hand. Red Bull’s number two fulfilled his contractual obligations perfectly, picking up the pieces should Verstappen falter.

“First of all, I have to make sure I'm able to keep the lead on the initial laps,” said Perez after qualifying, as he was set to start next to Fernando Alonso on the front row. “And if I'm able to do that, to keep this lion behind, it will be good, because I think I can focus on my race.”

Among those aforementioned practice chasms between Verstappen and the rest of the field, Alonso was the driver responsible for closing the gap to just over two tenths in the night-time FP2 session. Although he was pessimistic about his chances of battling with Perez in the race, stating that he was not expecting to battle with the Mexican over the course of the grand prix, the Spaniard continued to look assured behind the wheel of his Aston Martin.

The British squad had already upset the order considerably after Bahrain in its stratospheric rise from midfielders to consistent podium contention, and had largely outperformed Ferrari and Mercedes as the two manufacturer squads hoped to challenge Red Bull for a title in 2023. Charles Leclerc’s penalty admittedly got Alonso onto the front row as the Monegasque also impressed, but the Silverstone squad’s strengths lie in race pace. And, apparently, it’s also a dab hand off the line.

Alonso led into the first corner of an F1 race for the first time since the 2012 German GP

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

Looking at GPS traces over the lap in qualifying, the AMR23 is particularly strong in the high-traction parts of the course. When the starting lights no longer permeated the Jeddah night sky, Alonso dropped the clutch and gathered pace at a considerably faster rate of knots relative to polesitter Perez. While the Guadalajara-born driver tried to close Alonso off, there was no stopping the green machine from threading the needle into Turn 1 and coming out the other side with the lead in its grasp. For those hoping Alonso could cause an upset, his lightning start captured the imagination… for about 10 seconds.

Alonso had got pretty much everything right about his start, except for one problem: he was too far to the left in his grid box. Like Esteban Ocon’s grid-based misadventure in Bahrain, Alonso was pretty quickly slapped with a 5s penalty to serve at his next pitstop; even if he could retain the lead that far into the race, Perez was hardly going to allow him to scamper off and build enough of a buffer to nullify the effect of the penalty. Instead, Perez ensured that this would be moot.

At the end of the third lap, with the drag reduction system now activated at this juncture, Perez captured a barrelling run on the leader and swept past with consummate ease into the first corner. Perhaps Alonso had dared to dream, fleetingly, that a first F1 win since 2013 was in the offing, but it instead looked as though Perez would now begin an irrepressible march into the night’s sky.

But if there’s any maxim that can be applied to Alonso and the trajectory of his racing career, it’s that he is completely unwilling to give up. Rather than let Perez run off into the distance unchecked and unchallenged, Alonso instead clung onto the Red Bull’s coat-tails and remained within a second to drink in the DRS assistance for the following laps. But that couldn’t quite last, and by the 10th lap the Aston Martin was dumped out of the one-second bracket; from there, the arrears began to grow rapidly in Perez’s favour.

The safety car also helped Alonso as he was able to serve his penalty ahead of his pitstop and retain second place, while also offering the opportunity to keep tabs on Perez for the restart

In the meantime, Verstappen was making steady progress from 15th. It hadn’t been quite the progression through the ranks that many were expecting following his quickfire route to the front in last year’s Belgian Grand Prix, but he reached seventh on lap 14 of 50 to settle in with the other frontrunners.

“At the beginning, the first few laps it was really hard to follow cars – with the street circuit, fast corners, and the walls all very close, you get like a kind of a tailwind effect,” he said. “So the car was a bit all over the place. But after a few laps, it all started to settle in a bit better and I could pick them off one by one.”

Carlos Sainz and Leclerc then pitted on succeeding laps to give Verstappen two further spots as the pitstop phase had tentatively opened, but the bigger boost to the reigning champion emerged when Lance Stroll came to a stop at Turn 8 and necessitated the safety car to materialise from the pits. With the order shuffled and set by the single-file running behind the Aston Martin Vantage, Verstappen could pit on terms with the leading pack and return to the track in fourth place, just behind George Russell.

The safety car played into Verstappen's hands as he jumped up to fourth behind Russell

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

The safety car also helped Alonso out as he was able to serve his penalty ahead of his pitstop and retain second place, while also offering the opportunity to keep tabs on Perez for the lap 21 restart. In both events, neither event quite worked out in his favour; Perez made the resumption of the race look simple and started to rebuild his lead over Alonso at a canter. When DRS was switched on for the start of lap 23, the lead was already bordering on 3s; Perez was away and looked untouchable.

Verstappen, meanwhile, was asked to be gentle with his tyres in the two laps following the restart. Race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase suggested that he wait until DRS was active once more to make his overtures towards the third place held by Russell. Studiously, he did so and waited until the end of the 23rd lap to pass, using DRS on the run out of Turn 24 to stalk the Briton and charge past into the final corner.

A podium secured for the time being, Verstappen’s next target was Alonso. It took barely a lap for the gap to melt away, and Verstappen then once again manoeuvred his way through with DRS at half-distance, cannoning past on the start/finish straight. This set up the Red Bull battle, and Perez was 5.5s clear at the point Verstappen climbed up to second.

The more defeatist onlookers hoping that Verstappen would face more of a challenge in 2023 were likely expecting the two-time title winner to start carving into Perez’s lead, and go one better than his Spa 2022 heroics. Instead, Perez held his own at the front, mitigating the damage from his team-mate behind and allowing him to chip no more than a tenth of a second away each lap.

The one-tenth delta per lap ebbed and flowed between the Red Bull duo; sometimes, Perez was able to squirrel away more time to occasionally swing the pendulum in his favour, but Verstappen kept chipping away and closed in to 4.3s of his team-mate. Then came the moment of fear, as Verstappen reported further driveshaft concerns, saying it felt “rough” and “makes a weird noise at high speed”. Reassurance emanated from the pitwall, as glances at the data had yielded no obvious causes behind the in-cockpit worries. But Verstappen nonetheless lifted off, reinstating Perez’s lead to around 5.2s – before the leader had his own run-in with a long brake pedal.

Race engineer Hugh Bird told Perez that the team was happy with the data on display, but it briefly looked as though the RB19s were walking wounded. Not that the lap times showed the drivers’ worried countenances, as both were settling into the high 1m32s and low 1m33s and matching each other blow for blow. Perez wasn’t entirely enamoured with the escalating pace, suggesting that the two drivers were “pushing without a reason”.

Perez kept himself out of range of Verstappen as Red Bull reliability worries niggled away

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

But Verstappen’s charge subsided; after a tense and terse tug-of-war between the leading pair, the man in second “did the calculations” and elected to relent, allowing Perez to stack a couple more seconds onto his overall lead – at least, until Verstappen threw his remaining cards on the table and snatched the point for fastest lap on the final tour, 0.282s better than anyone else.

“Once I got past Fernando, I could do my own race,” Perez reflected afterwards. “But when that safety car came out, it reminded me of Jeddah of last year and I was like, ‘Ah, not again!’ But luckily we didn't repeat, as we hadn't pitted at the time. It was a new race after the safety car, and very early on, Max came back.

“We were basically towards the end just making sure we kept that healthy gap between myself and Max. But that meant we were pushing quite hard, trying to maintain the gap.”

Alonso had a gap of his own to maintain in his pursuit of third place; although he’d served his penalty in the pitstop, Mercedes had caught a whiff of a further investigation directed at Alonso and instructed Russell to push up on the Aston Martin ahead, aiming to keep within 5s on the off-chance that the stewards would cast their magnifying glasses over Alonso.

It emerged that Aston Martin, when avoiding contact with the car to allow Alonso to serve his penalty, had left a jack underneath the rear of the car. The FIA believed that this nullified the performance of the penalty, resulting in a 10s addition

Having been informed of Alonso’s earlier penalty in his pursuit of a podium, Russell had suggested over the radio that the team quell any hints of battle between him and Lewis Hamilton on a contra-strategy, and instead anoint the younger Brit with the tools to close the Spaniard down. Instead, he was informed that Alonso’s penalty had already been served, Russell later labelling their radio cross purposes as “confusing”. But when the call came later to keep hounding Alonso, Russell tried his best to comply.

Although the 5.1s difference at the line wasn’t enough to benefit from a possible further 5s penalty for Alonso, Mercedes’ prescience appeared to have paid off. Moments after Alonso had basked in the adulation of his 100th podium finish in F1, Aston Martin observed an unwelcome message upon the FIA bulletin board: a 10s penalty had been applied to its charge’s race time and relegated him to fourth.

Thus, Russell didn’t get the satisfaction of standing on the podium. Instead, he was made to endure the more tedious fate of being probed by a room sparsely populated by journalists, as he attempted to explain the prelude to his sudden promotion into the top three. It emerged that Aston Martin, when avoiding contact with the car to allow Alonso to serve his penalty, had left a jack underneath the rear of the car. The FIA believed that this nullified the performance of the penalty, resulting in a 10s addition: the full 5s for the previous offence, and another five for the apparent insolence.

Alonso's podium joy appeared to be short-lived until the FIA tied itself in knots with its own rules

Photo by: Glenn Dunbar / Motorsport Images

The story, however, did not end there. Aston Martin submitted a right to review request, which was then deemed admissible by the FIA. Per the stewards’ review, the team submitted seven different examples of similar penalties carried out in the pits; each one featured a rear jack positioned underneath the car and all had gone unpunished. Given the precedent that Aston Martin had brought to the stewards’ attention, Alonso’s penalty was rescinded and his third-place finish declared perfectly legitimate.

Mercedes’ first top-three result of the season will have to wait in that case, and it remains unknown how long Russell had custody of the third-place trophy. Even with Alonso’s penalty, Hamilton had remained in fifth either way having been able to make a long stint on the mediums work out.

Mercedes opted for an aggressive strategy and placed Hamilton on the hard tyres to begin with, and thus he struggled to make headway early on as he skated about on a high fuel load and the hardest tyres. But the race came to him, particularly as the Ferraris fell away, and yielded a solid fifth place after the seven-time champion admitted earlier in the weekend that he didn’t feel “connected” to the W14.

Ferrari, meanwhile, felt that a podium was possible in Jeddah. Leclerc’s run to second on the grid was impressive and, despite his 10-place penalty on the grid, the team started him on soft tyres to make an ascent through the ranks early on. But progress was less rapid than hoped, while Sainz lost a position to Stroll in spectacular fashion on the opening lap when the Canadian swept around the outside at Turn 13. It proved to be a harbinger of the miserable race the Scuderia was in for.

“A bit surprised because after Friday and before the weekend, I thought that we had a chance of being the second force here in Jeddah,” Sainz mused afterwards, shocked that Ferrari had been largely fourth-best in the pecking order. “But I think that last stint on the hard proves that we still have a lot of work to do.

“Right now, we're not where we want to be in terms of race pace, in terms of car in general the balance even in dirty air following. We just struggled a bit, and if we already overheat the tyres in clean air then imagine following – we just eat them alive. And we need clean air to produce some kind of decent lap times.”

Leclerc, for his part, had been frustrated by a lack of communication from his own team during the safety car. He’d left a gap to the car in front to ensure he didn’t overheat the tyres, but was told late on that he could push up to try and emerge ahead of a pit-exiting Hamilton. “I was too late for being on the limit of the delta,” the Monegasque lamented, although the Mercedes driver later swallowed up Sainz regardless to move up to fifth.

There were no such communication issues at Red Bull, described by Alonso as being in a “different league” to everybody else so far in the 2023 stakes. A challenge from outside the team, unless the winds change drastically, looks increasingly unlikely at these early stages. Sure, a development race can turbocharge a team’s ambitions if the new parts offer great impetus but, as it stands, Perez is the only real threat to Verstappen. And even then, a driveshaft has to break to keep them level…

Perez took the spoils in Saudi but knows Verstappen will look to strike back in Australia

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images