The metric that shows parallels in Verstappen's and Alonso's intra-team dominance

Losing second place to Charles Leclerc at the Las Vegas Grand Prix mattered little to Sergio Perez. When Lewis Hamilton was handed a few setbacks in the Vegas race and only finished seventh, Perez's third place was enough to put Formula 1's 2023 runner-up spot beyond all doubt. Thus, it became the first time that Red Bull had locked out the top two positions in the drivers' championship across its seven drivers' title wins.

Mission complete, right? If one simply looks at the results and nothing more, then sure; Perez did the job that he was hired to do in his unofficial role as Max Verstappen's number two and finished as runner-up in the championship stakes. He achieved that with the best car on the grid, thus netting his expected championship placing, fulfilling his obligations and can consider 2023 a resounding success.

Except, that's not quite the case. That it took until the penultimate round of the championship to seal second ahead of Hamilton in an inferior car when Verstappen had clinched the title four rounds prior is one thing; to finish almost 300 points shy of his team-mate having amassed just nine podium finishes all year (compared to Verstappen's 19 victories and 21 podiums in total) suggests that it was hardly a particularly vintage season. Second place arrived almost by default, rather than it being a hard-earned consolation prize. It's true that he did his job in helping Red Bull seal the constructors' championship, although Verstappen amassed enough points single-handedly to achieve the feat.

This should not be considered a slight on Perez's abilities as a racing driver, and there are mitigating circumstances here. Perez has frequently cited his frustrations in how his driving style clashes with the Red Bull lineage of cars, as his preference for a more neutral steering characteristic does not necessarily align with how the cars 'want' to be driven. This is something that Verstappen understands, and his ability to coax a car that dances around on the rear axle into doing his bidding has underpinned his championship triumphs over the past three years.

And Perez has come under pressure this season; he has cited that his season began to come unglued as early as Miami, and only managed to recover his confidence after a post-Qatar set-up breakthrough in the simulator. In that time, he had much in the way of soul-searching to do in order to get into the right mindset during race weekends, and had to cope with a sequence of races that did not seem to go well.

That all being said, there are two facts that must be stated. The first fact: the RB19 is one of the most dominant cars ever seen in F1 history. Winning 21 of 22 races has completely outclassed McLaren's 1988 season as the gold standard of dominance, especially as the MP4/4's status looked untouchable.

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The second fact: the point of a second driver in a championship-contending team is to provide back-up to the lead driver. Should misfortune befall said lead driver, then the number two picks up the pieces. That Perez finished second to a Verstappen victory just four times (albeit having beaten him to the win twice in 2023) suggests that this role is only being fulfilled about 30% of the time.

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Perez has been in Verstappen's shadow for almost the entire 2023 season

This led this writer into a bit of a thought experiment: what makes the perfect number two? How do you define it? Are there any drivers who have fulfilled it, and are there any who haven't?

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For that, we need to consider whether Perez has fulfilled it. In 2023's standings, he has - but due to the complete lack of competition from anywhere else on the grid, finishing second was a foregone conclusion that he was close to missing out on. Is that merely circumstantial, or does he stack up less favourably as a number two compared to, oh, let's say 25 years of other examples?

It should be easy to work that out. What we've done is this: we've taken every race where both the champion and their team-mate in a given season were classified, and worked out the gap at the flag between them. Then we discard anomalies, take an average, and consider that as the delta between two team-mates. In theory, if a grand prix involving the field of a given season was going to be conducted tomorrow, one could assume the gap at the end between team-mates. First, some disclaimers, as we don't profess this to be a thorough scientific study iterated through hundreds of simulations. It's just a spreadsheet that took one afternoon and three cups of coffee to work through. We're going to call the metric "expected gap".

As mentioned, significant anomalies, like the Australian Grand Prix's safety car-compressed finishing order and the Monaco Grand Prix's two-lap gap between them have been eliminated, and penalties have been removed to reflect their finishing positions at the line. Any races with retirements have not been counted.

Perez averaged a 17.813s gap at the chequered flag compared to his team-mate, which is about 0.3s per lap slower over a theoretical 60-lap race. That doesn't sound too outrageous but this was a gap that was the difference between finishing second to Verstappen and finishing in the lower reaches of the points

For full transparency, many results in which the two drivers finished over a minute apart have been discounted as well; in the modern era, this is increasingly rare and only a point of note if misfortune has befallen one of the drivers. This is to avoid any further skews in the data, which may have been caused by either an incident or mechanical issue.

While anomalies have been rare in results among the past 20 years and the era of hyper-reliability, this begins to change as the data set on the other side of the millennium boundary is explored. Here, larger gaps are far more common, as drivers were more likely to retire and leave larger time deltas in between. Results are more varied as a result. Sprint races have also not been counted.

Now that everyone's aware that this is most definitely not a peer-reviewed scientific journal, or a flawless statistical analysis that models every single fluctuation in results - and that this is simply an investigation into the average time gaps between team-mates - let's consider Perez's 2023 versus Verstappen. Having collected his results over the season, he has averaged a 17.813s gap at the chequered flag compared to his team-mate, which is about 0.3s per lap slower over a theoretical 60-lap race. That doesn't sound too outrageous but, in instances where the field spread was much smaller, this was a gap that was the difference between finishing second to Verstappen and finishing in the lower reaches of the points.

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Since the start of 2022, Verstappen's gap over Perez has continued to grow

After the opening five rounds of the season, this was a void that was often occupied by Mercedes and Aston Martin, then Ferrari and McLaren as their seasons began to improve. Furthermore, this was also an increase on his gap to Verstappen over 2022, which stood at 11.997s on average at the flag. Although this put him much closer to his team-mate, he actually missed out on second in the championship to Leclerc, owing to the Ferrari driver's good form throughout the year.

These are significant improvements to Perez's first year with Red Bull in 2021. Hoping to stop the second seat from becoming a revolving door as Daniel Ricciardo, Pierre Gasly, and Alex Albon all came and went, Perez was some way short of Verstappen and was almost 30 seconds slower on average throughout a grand prix - 29.983s being his average delta at the flag. That's just short of being 0.5s a lap slower in a 60-lap race, which amazingly puts him below the 27.387s that separated Verstappen and Albon in their season-and-a-half together.

Over his three years at Red Bull, Perez crosses the chequered flag 19.931s after Verstappen on average. Below is a list of averages to see how that compares with other champion-number two chequered-flag average gaps over their courses as team-mates. For reference, we've split Hamilton and Nico Rosberg's titles between the 2014-16 period to note the slender advantage Rosberg had in his title-winning year in races that they both finished.

When Valtteri Bottas joined Mercedes in 2017 when Rosberg announced his shock retirement, he largely acted as a something of a good foil for Hamilton and could often pile the pressure on in qualifying. The averages from 2017 and 2020 are not dissimilar, with an expected 9.31s gap to Hamilton in his first year relative to his 10.580s figure during the last season that Hamilton took the title. 2018 and 2019 also balance each other out somewhat; just as '18 was a poor season that led to no race wins and an average gap of 18.358s at the flag, Bottas upped his game in the following year and managed to put Hamilton under the microscope on a more regular basis - thus, the expected gaps between them was just 5.852s.

History already shows how close Hamilton and Rosberg were. Curiously, their smallest average delta was from 2015, arguably the season in which Hamilton had the much greater advantage in the championship battle. This is helped by Rosberg regularly finishing behind Hamilton by small margins, and his late-season resurgence as Hamilton arguably took his foot off the gas helps to address some of the balance - and it arguably set the foundations for Rosberg's 2016 title win.

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Hamilton and Rosberg were the closest matched team-mates - and the only pair who became world champions as team-mates

Sebastian Vettel's performance over Mark Webber tended to fluctuate with field spread. In 2010 and 2012, there were many more teams contending for victories while Red Bull had its own issues to contend with. In situations that featured uncertainty, Webber fared much better as Vettel seemed to be much more affected when the car was not particularly strong. In circumstances where Red Bull was dominant, Vettel was far stronger.

Their 2010 expected gap was the smallest as Webber was one of the key title contenders that year; the Australian was expected to finish just 3.198s down on his team-mate that year. This was higher in 2012 at 12.324s, but pales in comparison to 2011 (14.925s) and 2013 (17.428s).

Jenson Button and Rubens Barrichello were very evenly matched at Brawn and it is no surprise to see their expected gap reflect this. Button's early-season dominance did much in the way of the heavy lifting for the Briton, as Barrichello's stronger second half to the season (and excellent Valencia win) tended to plug any of the larger gaps from early races. The gap noted between Hamilton and Heikki Kovalainen is curious, particularly as Hamilton was generally well ahead of his team-mate in terms of pace. But many of Kovalainen's stronger results (his Hungary win, his fourth in France, and second at Monza) arrived on days where Hamilton had not been particularly strong. That year's McLaren had also demonstrated questionable reliability, which creates a somewhat smaller dataset to work with.

Fisichella was, like Perez, a racer who was considered in high esteem during their time in midfield machinery, and had to exert a saint's patience for a chance in a championship-contending car

The expected gap between Kimi Raikkonen and Felipe Massa reflects their closeness as Ferrari team-mates in the year where the Finn triumphed at the final race, succeeding the champion/team-mate gap which most accurately reflects the deficit that Perez faces now. Across their span as team-mates, Fernando Alonso enjoyed a level of supremacy over Giancarlo Fisichella at Renault that ensured his main title challenges came from elsewhere: McLaren and Raikkonen in 2005, and Michael Schumacher and Ferrari in 2006.

Fisichella was, like Perez, a racer who was considered in high esteem during their time in midfield machinery, and had to exert a saint's patience for a chance in a championship-contending car. They'd both enjoyed unlikely wins for previous iterations of the Aston Martin team, with Fisichella's famous Brazil 2003 win for Jordan the last for that team until Perez's last-to-first victory on the Bahrain short course in 2020. Their exploits in lesser cars earned them drives at the top teams of their era - and both had to face up an F1 great. Neither were particularly flattered in their times as team-mates to Alonso and Verstappen respectively.

Although Fisichella scored two wins at Renault, he was made to look decidedly average in his span as Alonso's wingman. When a car was difficult to drive, it lit a fire under the Roman and led him to achieve some of his best results when conditions hinted that a rare pay-day was possible. In a strong car, he seemed to switch off - and the deficit to Alonso seemed to reflect that. His expected gap to Alonso remains smaller than Perez's gap to Verstappen, but the 19.326s is nonetheless similar in magnitude to Perez's 19.931s deficit.

Fisichella's lacklustre turn as a champion's number two followed Barrichello's dutiful efforts to support Schumacher. While the Brazilian hated being considered as nothing more than Schumacher's rear gunner, he was good at it; across 2002 and 2004, he arguably completed the mission that Perez had been tasked for this year with a dominant car, and picked up the wins when Schumacher could not. Of the five seasons that Schumacher and Barrichello were team-mates, 2002 was the closest expected at 5.858s. This might have been assisted slightly by the two "photo finishes" in Austria and the US, although Barrichello was ahead in the former and Schumacher ahead in the latter - so we can consider the overall figure balanced. The Brazilian's 2001 held the largest expected gap of 18.674s in a season that had Williams and McLaren vying for victories.

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Comparisons between Fisichella and Perez and their respective careers is growing

To get anything close to the Perez and Fisichella levels of deficit, we have to go back to 1994 and 1995. This is where the whole thought experiment started; when considering Perez's shortfall compared to Verstappen with an esteemed work colleague, one wondered if this was the biggest gap between team-mates since Max's father Jos was paired with Schumacher at Benetton for parts of 1994. We weren't far off.

This is where the metric gets less accurate, and this is not only because of the reduced reliability shrinking our overall data sets. This is also down to the circumstances of how Benetton went racing at that time, and how focused the team was around Schumacher. Since his 'liberation' from Jordan in 1991, Schumacher effectively had the entire structure of the team built around his successes, often at the detriment of the driver in the other car. It, like Red Bull between 2018 and 2021, suffered from the phenomenon known as "Spinal Tap Drummer Syndrome", in which the second car had multiple drivers over a short span. Nelson Piquet, Martin Brundle, JJ Lehto, Jos Verstappen, and Johnny Herbert all drove alongside Schumacher at the team between 1991 and 1995, as the second berth appeared to be an afterthought.

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It's hard to quantify an expected gap between Schumacher and Herbert in 1995 thanks to those circumstances. They rarely finished together on track that year amid the lesser reliability of that era - and when they did, Schumacher was a long way ahead of the Essex racer - and finished a lap ahead on five occasions throughout that year, and was 50 seconds ahead in their Spanish GP 1-2 finish. Herbert won two races that year, benefitting from Schumacher's clashes with Damon Hill at Silverstone and Monza along with Alesi's retirement from the latter, but was never allowed real parity with Schumacher over their season-and-a-bit at Benetton.

That same lack of parity had been seen in 1994 as well, as Schumacher never really had someone who could match him at the team. Verstappen Sr was something of a crash magnet in his formative years, having been thrust into the drive after winning the German F3 title as JJ Lehto recovered from a broken neck. It's not fair to quantify Lehto's gap as his neck had barely recovered by the time he returned, and Herbert's two retirements at the end of the year reveal little.

In qualifying pace, Herbert at least got far closer to Schumacher than Verstappen and Lehto ever really had - and the Finn chalked up a fifth and a sixth on the grid in his handful of outings for Benetton.

Perhaps, in this period of our expected gap metric becoming increasingly more obfuscated, it's okay to call it there on a nice parallel. Max Verstappen, who will go down in F1 history as one of the all-time greats, has exerted a level of dominance over a team-mate last seen when his father went up against Schumacher, another hall-of-fame racer in F1's pantheon of champions.

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Verstappen's dominance over Perez is only echoing F1 world champions before him