Why Perez’s F1 2023 struggles against Verstappen won't be easy to resolve 

“At the moment, I’m feeling very comfortable
with the car.” When Sergio Perez 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, Perez 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, Verstappen’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 Perez 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 Perez on pole into a comprehensive defeat for his team-mate. Perez 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 [Perez] 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.”

Photo by: Michael Potts / Motorsport Images

Perez'z defeat to Verstappen in Miami has widely been considered as a turning point in the 2023 season

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 Perez’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, Perez failed to
make Q3 (other than his Austrian sprint race front row) for another four events. When he did get back into the final qualifying segment, in Hungary, he finished just ninth.

Over the course of the season, Perez’s average deficit to Verstappen in the top sprint and qualifying sessions they contested together was 0.4 seconds. That’s with outliers such as wet sessions removed. It’s also actually an underestimate of Verstappen’s potential,
given the only times he missed Q3 were due to
his Jeddah driveshaft drama and Red Bull’s
sub-par showing in Singapore, where he
beat Perez anyway.

Perez lost his way as Red Bull went through its typical ride height and wing level set-up work through the weekends that formed the meat of 2023’s mid-season, while also trying to modify his driving style to emulate Verstappen’s results

“Max has the ability, confidence and skill to extract that moment of grip out of a tyre,” Horner explains of the differences between his drivers in qualifying in 2023. “Checo has to be more settled. There can’t be as many variables for Checo.”

In Barcelona, one week on from Monaco, Horner spoke of the need for Perez to get the “pressure” of a first title shot “off his shoulders”. But the qualifying focus on both Perez and Verstappen is important because it was where the RB19 was ‘weak’ in 2023. We place that word in scare quotes firstly because Red Bull still took 14 poles last year, and also because the team feels the advantage provided to the rest by new soft tyres on low fuel means “limitations of a certain car can be masked”, according to Verstappen.

Perez reckons “the problems that we had really made me understand a lot more what I was doing with the set-up, how I was setting up the car, which direction I need to go when I get issues”.

“So,” he adds, “It’s something that’s definitely gonna make us stronger coming [in 2024].”

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

Efforts to modify his driving style to emulate Verstappen from Barcelona onwards didn't reap rewards for Perez

Decoded, this means Perez lost his way as Red Bull went through its typical ride height and wing level set-up work through the weekends that formed the meat of 2023’s mid-season, while also trying to modify his driving style to emulate Verstappen’s results – something that first arose around the Barcelona weekend.

Running through these efforts were the steering wheel ‘tools’ adjustments for brake bias, differential and engine braking that drivers can use to try and improve their through-corner handling balance as laps and stints progress. A big part of Verstappen’s dominance last year was how he began to use adjustments to these to his advantage, starting in Miami.

The art of falling apart

The preferences of each driver on car handling played an overarching role in how they ended up so far apart. Perez prefers an understeering front, while Verstappen enjoys being able to tame a lively rearward balance – getting his turn-in done early and rapidly. This brings particular laptime gains over Perez in low- and medium-speed sweeping turns, since Verstappen can get on the throttle earlier.

Plus, by getting so much rotation done early, Verstappen can actually
open up the steering again and so lessen the tyre load during race runs. Trying to replicate Verstappen’s approach appears to have knocked Perez even further off course last year.

Red Bull sees the imbalance across its driver line-up on car handling as something of a fault. Technical director Pierre Wache says the team “failed” on this in 2023, but Horner nevertheless reckons Perez was getting “stronger and stronger” on coaxing the best from the RB19 as the campaign ended. This was the result of an intense three-day stint in Red Bull’s simulator after the Qatar GP, poring over his season’s data after a particular poor weekend at that returning event.

Perez arrived at the Abu Dhabi season finale with second in the drivers’ standings secured, which gave Red Bull the championship 1-2 sweep it had never previously achieved. And yet, the focus fell so intensely on Perez’s poor 2023 performances compared with Verstappen precisely because they fatally undermined the hopes of an engaging title battle even within a single team. Alain Prost against Ayrton Senna at McLaren or Lewis Hamilton versus Nico Rosberg for Mercedes this was not.

The logical extension of this part of the weak overall 2023 narrative was how Perez’s results might hurt Red Bull when the gap to the other teams is smaller. Or indeed erased altogether. Because all periods of F1 domination do end. And these questions were all wrapped up in the wider Red Bull group’s transition through the succession ignited by the passing of company
co-founder Dietrich Mateschitz in 2022.

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

Although Perez did enough to secure second in the points last year, concerns persist over whether his underperformance relative to Verstappen will have bigger consequences once other teams catch up

It was clear early in 2023 that satellite team AlphaTauri could not simply make up the numbers at the foot of the F1 pack under the scrutiny of new Red Bull CEO of corporate projects and new investments, essentially the new top marketer-in-chief, Oliver Mintzlaff.

While an assessment of a possible team sale ended in the decision to instead give the junior team more Red Bull parts and even transfer more aerodynamic staff to the UK and its Bicester aerodynamics facility nearer Red Bull’s Milton Keynes base, the power distribution across the two teams was altered. This change is understood to have strengthened Horner’s position, while long-time key Mateschitz lieutenant Helmut Marko now faces an uncertain F1 future.

Even when their positions were as entrenched as they used to be in the previous decade at Red Bull, both Horner and Marko backed savage driver line-up decisions time and again. This brought them Verstappen and a second period of domination at the championship’s head. But they haven’t been able to resolve the line-up imbalance Red Bull has had ever since Daniel Ricciardo
left for Renault in 2019.

In the five events that followed Qatar last year, Perez’s qualifying deficit came in at 0.37s down on Verstappen – still a substantial gap. Indeed, Perez never started on the front row again in 2023 after Spa

Ricciardo is a candidate to take Perez’s seat should the latter's comparatively poor form continue – either for 2025 as per the current contractual situation, or perhaps sooner if rumours about Red Bull dissatisfaction with Perez prove to be true. The pressure for change will mount if Red Bull’s rivals can close the gap this year.

Get the balance right

Perez maintains if he can “hit consistency, to build a platform” that will avoid what went so wrong in 2023 reoccurring in 2024. Again, he’s hanging his hopes on maintaining the gains from that post-Qatar simulator analysis.

“That’s my main priority,” he explains. “To be able to progress through the season. [Wherever] I start, it’s just important that we can do a weekend [overall], keep evolving and keep getting better.”

Running against this are two elements. First, in the five events that followed Qatar last year, Perez’s qualifying deficit came in at 0.37s down on Verstappen – still a substantial gap. Indeed, Perez never started on the front row again in 2023 after Spa, prior to the summer break.

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

The Belgian GP in July remains the last time Perez started from the front row - despite supposed post-Qatar gains

And then there’s Verstappen. His own comparative ‘weakness’ early in 2023 – where he never lost the standings lead even as Perez claimed those wins in the opening four rounds – was what raised hopes of a title fight that were dashed so soon.

Verstappen detests the understeer balance that is so rewarded on street circuits such as Baku, where 90-degree turns predominate. At that stage last year he was also still struggling to gel with a substitute performance engineer on elements including the steering wheel ‘tools’ settings.

Once they were fully aligned, the combination with Verstappen’s improved feeling with the RB19 over a race accrued during his Baku defeat proved to be devastating. His progress also started as F1 reached the higher-speed courses where Verstappen could use his car-handling preference to expose the gulf in class between himself and Perez.

Calendar changes for 2024 have brought forward Suzuka and pushed back Azerbaijan. Assuming Red Bull’s dominance continues, this raises questions about whether Perez can lay down even a stunted championship challenge given what came to be in 2023…

Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool

Suzuka was one of Perez's worst weekends of 2023, and its appearance earlier in this year's calendar as Baku moves back suggests it will be harder for him to mount an early challenge

Waiting in the wings

Daniel Ricciardo

The favourite to replace Perez, since Red Bull’s management admits that was a key target for Dan when he began his comeback with AlphaTauri midway through 2023. That was disrupted by his Zandvoort crash but Ricciardo did enough in securing seventh (from fourth on the grid) in Mexico that Horner declared he “looked like the Daniel of old”. Publicly, discussion is over a targeted 2025 promotion, but if there’s really to be one last swing of the Marko driver axe, it could be sooner.

Yuki Tsunoda/Liam Lawson

Grouped together because they’re surely AlphaTauri’s short-term future. If Ricciardo gained an early Red Bull promotion, it would be logical to expect the driver who matched his number of points finishes as his injury replacement to return. But Lawson would need to demonstrate his long-term worth at Red Bull’s junior team. Tsunoda is about to embark on a fourth season there and that there is no momentum for a promotion speaks volumes, with his erratic form a big factor. Attention should instead go on Aston Martin’s 2026 works Honda engine deal and what it might mean for Tsunoda’s long-term future.

Lando Norris

Contracted to McLaren until the end of 2025. But, of course, this is F1; with enough will and, indeed, sufficient cash from Red Bull, he could join sooner. Horner has admitted to sounding Norris out “a couple of times over the years”. Yet those are just the public utterances – McLaren insiders suggest Red Bull has continued to woo Norris (who was offered an early F1 debut with Toro Rosso midway through his 2018 F2 season) in subtle ways all through his five years at the top level. He and Verstappen get on well, but his high performance level would risk destabilising Red Bull’s relationship with its biggest asset. So, a shock Norris switch remains only a nice theory – until it happens in reality.

Photo by: Simon Galloway / Motorsport Images

Could Norris be an option for Red Bull to replace Perez?