It’s been remarkably easy to forget the driver market’s biggest question mark in the frenetic early months of the 2024 season.
You’d have struggled to find anyone in December 2023 who thought Sergio Pérez had a genuine shot at a contract extension with Red Bull Racing.
In fact the Mexican’s form had been so dire during the campaign that there were even briefly rumours he wouldn’t see out the final year of his contract in 2024.
His 2023 statistics were grim.
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In a record-breaking year for Max Verstappen comprising 19 victories and a third consecutive world championship, Pérez scored fewer than half his teammate’s points and only just clinched second in the standings after Lewis Hamilton’s late scoring collapse.
He won two races but collected only nine podiums in total, including just five top-three finishes after the Miami Grand Prix, the moment his campaign began to nosedive.
But those days feel like a long time ago, and today you’d be hard pressed to find anyone talking about Pérez’s contract as a current hot topic in the paddock.
Partly that’s because the news cycle has been hectic off the track in 2024, even by Formula 1 standards.
That’s especially true given most of the headlines have been coming from elsewhere in the Red Bull Racing organisation. Sorting gout Pérez’s future has felt like a second-order issue to hammering out the fate of the racing team.
And it seems like it’s just the Pérez likes it.
Racing like a driver reborn, the once down-and-out Pérez is thriving once again at the title-leading team in a last-gasp bid to extend his career.
The question now is: can he possibly keep it up?
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A TALE OF TWO JAPANS
To understand just how big a turnaround this is for Pérez, compare his strong showing in Suzuka at the weekend to his performance at the same track last year.
The 2023 Japanese Grand Prix was the beginning of his nadir. It went together with the subsequent race in Qatar, where he crashed out of the sprint just as Verstappen claimed the championship.
They were his darkest days.
In Japan last year he qualified a whopping 0.773 seconds slower than pole-getter Verstappen and started fifth on the grid.
The race was even worse.
He forced Lewis Hamilton off the road in a botched defensive move on the first lap, picking up front wing damage. Overtaking Fernando Alonso on the way into the pits for repairs cost him a five-second penalty.
He crashed again shortly afterwards in an insipid attempt to pass Kevin Magnussen at the hairpin. With another front wing broken, the team opted to retire the car rather than send the Mexican back out.
But Pérez was then forced to embarrassingly rejoin the race 25 laps down to serve a five-second penalty for the Magnussen crash, ensuring he wouldn’t have it converted to a grid penalty for the following round.
All that while Verstappen crushed the opposition with ease in the same car.
“It was a shocker of a race for him today,” Horner said understatedly at the time.
But you would hardly recognise that catastrophe-prone driver as the one suiting up for Red Bull Racing this year.
He’s cut his average qualifying deficit down from 0.504 seconds last season to 0.28 seconds after four rounds — well within acceptable realms — and has finished second to Verstappen three times.
Australia was the only blip, where he was the team’s sole finisher in fifth, but his car was hampered by a floor obstruction during the race, and the RB20 lacked its usual competitive advantage at Albert Park anyway. Fifth was probably reasonably representative.
Pérez has put the stunning improvement down to a new approach to working with the car.
The six-time race winner’s struggles have grown progressively larger in this regulatory era. As Red Bull Racing has developed the car, it’s become edgier and more difficult to control.
Verstappen has an almost superhuman ability to tame a snappy rear axle. Pérez has struggled to replicate the Dutchman’s speed with a similar set-up.
Accepting that he wouldn’t be able to bring the car fully into his orbit appears to be part of the secret to finding the sweet spot.
“We were playing around with the car far too much [last year] and just going through it,” he explained. “I think now we have a much better base.
“We are a lot happier, and the weekends just progress.
“I think when we came [to Japan] last year we were at the stage of our season where nothing was working, and when you are in that, you just go around in circles and circles.
“Then we found out towards the end of the year that it was better to just step back and not try to chase it too much with the set-up, because then you start compromising other things.
“I think that’s been the case for this year.
“I’m a lot more comfortable, a lot happier, and the confidence is slowly coming back.”
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BUT CAN IT LAST?
Sceptical observers might note that at this stage last season Pérez was also in fine form.
The same is true of the year before too, when he inked his two-year contract extension on the same weekend he won the Monaco Grand Prix.
In both seasons his form tailed off considerably, particularly last year’s dire collapse.
“You can see he can do it,” Red Bull motorsport adviser Helmut Marko told Sky Sports Germany at the weekend. “But perhaps it also plays a role that next year’s contracts are at stake, this year much earlier than usual. That also seems to be very motivating.”
It was a classic Marko backhanded compliment, but given Pérez’s form over recent years and his tendency to tail off, it wasn’t totally unjustified.
Pérez made it five rounds into last season before spectacularly falling apart.
Victories in Saudi Arabia and Azerbaijan — both merited — delivered him a wave of confidence. He even said publicly that he considered himself a title rival to Verstappen.
Then he arrived in Miami. Verstappen qualified ninth, unable to set a time due to red flags, while Pérez took pole. Starting so far ahead on the grid, Pérez seemed guaranteed to overhaul his six-point deficit to the Dutchman put himself in the championship lead for the first time in his career.
But Verstappen won on Sunday, rising eight places to beat the pole-getter by five seconds.
Pérez’s confidence appeared totally shot.
He missed out on Q3 for the following five consecutive races, including two Q1 knockouts, and collected only five more podiums for the entire year.
Hamilton came perilously close to beating him to second in the drivers championship despite the RB19 going down as the most dominant car in Formula 1 history.
There was a clear psychological element to it all — something that doesn’t appear to be weighing on Pérez this season.
Only he knows whether that’s because he’s accepted that he can’t beat Verstappen to the title or because he’s grasped that his career is on the line, but it’s returned him to a position of power after the down days of late 2023.
And having returned to Japan and performed strongly, he’s now on the way to banishing some of last year’s demons.
“I think we are in a good momentum,” he said. “Last year [Japan] was probably my worst weekend, so I think if we are strong in places like this … I think we can be strong anywhere else. It’s been a good weekend.”
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IT’S NOT ALL UP TO HIM
Asked in Japan whether Pérez’s chances of retention had been boosted by his strong start to the season, Red Bull Racing boss Christian Horner reiterated that it was the Mexican’s to lose.
“I think his confidence is high, he’s very focused on the job at hand and he’s comfortable in the team,” he said, per ESPN.
“He knows he’s out of contract for next year. It’s his seat to lose.
“He’s very popular in the team, and he’s started the season in the best possible way. He just needs to keep doing what he’s doing.”
It’s a crucial backing in a frenetic market that could explode at any moment, with 13 drivers out of contract and several young guns pushing for promotion.
“The whole driver market seems to be very early this year,” Horner said. “Everybody seems to be rushing around and we’re only four races into the year.
“We’re not in a huge rush. Obviously there’s a significant amount of interest in our cars, as you would expect, but Checo has the priority, and it’s going to be a few more races yet before we start to think about next year.”
Pérez said he expected confirmation potentially as early as the sport’s return to Europe at the end of May.
“Obviously the driver market is moving,” he told Sky Sports F1. “In the next few weeks are going to be a lot of movements for sure, so I expect within a month to really know what I’m doing next year.
“I am pretty relaxed about it. My main focus is in F1. Whatever comes next, I’m really pleased with what I’ve done in the sport so far.”
But talk of a fast-moving driver market is contrary to some expectations of a slow burn.
The next contract cycle is crucial for both teams and drivers given anything more than a one-year deal will cross into 2026 and the new regulations.
Teams will want drivers in place that they can count on to help develop the new car in tandem with next year’s season.
Drivers will want to see how teams progress this year to try to make an educated guess about the right place to be in 2026.
Red Bull Racing especially can afford to wait, knowing any driver in with a shot at the sport’s best car will willingly delay decisions elsewhere.
There is one exception to the rule, however.
Carlos Sainz is one of the sport’s most in-form drivers, a multiple race winner and without a seat in 2025.
He’s spoken openly about wanting to pin down a drive for 2025 as soon as possible to keep himself above the fray of a messy silly season.
Horner has already hinted that Sainz is on his radar as an option for next season in what would be a blockbuster return to the Red Bull stable to take on his former Toro Rosso teammate.
Sainz is a logical pick if the team wants pure performance.
His only possible disadvantage is that he might push Verstappen too hard as a genuine rival.
Ironically Pérez’s strength could be to sell himself as a better fit for the team.
If he can continue to perform at this level for the rest of the season, he’ll be a reliable number two who can help win the team the constructors championship without upsetting the already delicate internal power dynamic that has Verstappen at its centre.
All this takes place against the backdrop of Red Bull Racing’s internal strife, and different political outcomes have been linked to different driver line-up options in 2025.
It also doesn’t consider the seemingly outside chance that the Red Bull program might finally take seriously the impressive Yuki Tsunoda or that Daniel Ricciardo might be able to rescue his season to contend for the seat.
Much of that is outside of Pérez’s hands. What he can control is his form, and if he can keep up the momentum of his first four races, he’s at least in with a shot at neutralising what had been billed as the biggest question of the 2024 season.