RACE REPORT
Pérez’s qualifying prang dents his title ambition
Make a mistake and Max will make you pay. Mark Hughes catalogues Sergio’s rise and fall over a roller-coaster month
Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc sat on pole for a third successive year at Baku and took his first podium of the season
Azerbaijan GP
Miami GP
Monaco GP
Four races in – and still Sergio Pérez was hanging in there, not letting team-mate Max Verstappen off the hook as the 2023 world championship apparently distilled into a battle between the Red Bull drivers. This had been against general expectations. But not so dissimilar to the start of 2022, other than this Red Bull has a bigger advantage over the competition.
There was a brief period in the first part of last season when Pérez was providing stiff competition for Verstappen. You may recall how it came to a head after Monaco, a race Pérez won, partly because he’d brought out the red flags on his final Q3 run, preventing Verstappen from completing a lap which had looked set to vault him ahead on the grid. It was Pérez and Verstappen’s respective starting positions of second and fourth which was the difference between first and third on race day. Verstappen believed Pérez had spun deliberately and wasn’t shy of saying so even to the outside world. So it can be imagined how it was inside the team.
Max’s father Jos took to Max’s own website to express his disappointment with how Red Bull had not prioritised Max in their race strategy. Helmut Marko immediately took issue with Jos for doing so. Resentments simmered even after Max’s previous performance superiority was resumed in subsequent races and he left Pérez far behind – and this came out into the open in the season’s penultimate race where Verstappen refused to help the team’s attempt at gaining Pérez second in the championship. Red Bull convened a meeting, grievances were aired and everyone got on with their lives. The team developed its new car for 2023, the RB19, and Verstappen proceeded to blitz the field with it in the opening race, with Pérez a very distant second. From the outside, it seemed like the natural order of things, a continuation of the latter half of last season.