There has never been a close contest between Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez during their four seasons together at Red Bull.
However Perez’s form this year sunk to an alarming low after around half-a-dozen races. This roughly coincided with the team’s decision to extend his contract, blowing the theory that a show of faith in their driver would spur him on to better things.
At this stage in the season it’s easy to overlook the fact Perez made a respectable start to the championship. He backed Verstappen up in one-two finishes for the team in three of the first four rounds. Six races in he’d finished every race in the top five and was second in the standings.
Yes, he was consistently behind his team mate to begin with, a factor most teams would query. Perez hasn’t qualified ahead of his team mate since Verstappen’s slip in qualifying at Miami last year, 31 rounds ago.
But following a particularly poor spell in the middle of last year, Perez ended the season in better shape. He carried that into this year but his season started to go off the rails at the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix. Perez failed to reach Q3, while Verstappen stuck the car on pole, and only recovered to eighth.
Red Bull team principal Christian Horner called his weekend an “anomaly”. But his form only worsened from there, and soon it began to seem his performance in the opening races was the real anomaly.
The performance gap between the two drivers on single-lap pace widened, at least on the occasions when Perez managed to set a representative lap time in qualifying. He hasn’t always done that, crashing in consecutive races at Silverstone and the Hungaroring.
As Red Bull have pressed on with their efforts to improve the RB20, the two drivers haven’t always had the same specification hardware. This also happens at other teams, but may have been aggravated in Perez’s case by his qualifying crashes, plus his huge shunt at Monaco after tangling with Kevin Magnussen who started four places behind him in 20th.
After Perez’s third point-less weekend out of five, Horner described the situation as “unsustainable”. But after a pair of seventh-place finishes and some reflection, Red Bull again appear to be hoping that a show of faith in Perez was lead to better performances. The outcome of the constructors’ championship is riding on whether they’ve made the right call, for while Perez goes into the summer break with just under half his team mates’ tally, Verstappen has out-scored him more than four-fold over the last eight races.
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Verstappen vs Perez: Season summary
Verstappen vs Perez: Race-by-race
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Unrepresentative comparisons omitted. Negative value: Verstappen was faster; Positive value: Perez was faster
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