Throughout his first season at Red Bull last year, Sergio Perez made it clear his lack of familiarity with the team’s car was costing him compared to his team mate.
Nonetheless he made obvious progress over the course of the season and in the final races played a vital role in ensuring Max Verstappen clinched the drivers’ championship.
Come the new season, when Perez planted his new RB18 on pole position for the second race of the season in Saudi Arabia – the first time he’d ever occupied the top spot on the grid for a Formula 1 race – it was clear he was more comfortable in the new chassis. Perhaps even more so than Verstappen, who couldn’t make it perform quite the way he wanted to in the opening races.
The team was dogged by reliability problems in the opening races. The pair pulled up before the finish in Bahrain (yet were classified, skewing that data point in Perez’s favour) and Verstappen dropped out in Australia too. As a result, going into the Spanish Grand Prix, Perez was only 19 points off his team mate.
Perez vs Verstappen race-by-race
That made Red Bull’s unhesitant and repeated issuing of team orders for Perez to assist Verstappen in Barcelona all the more eye-catching, and a marked contrast to Ferrari’s way of going racing this year. It meant that when Perez won in Monaco (aided by out-qualifying his team mate again, though had Perez not crashed in Q3 he might not have done) he closed to within 15 points of his team mate, a gap that might have been narrower still had Red Bull allowed the pair to race in Spain.
But these hypotheticals soon became moot as Verstappen clicked with the RB18 and Perez suffered another technical retirement in Canada, levelling that tally with his team mate. Only a lump of debris at Silverstone stopped Verstappen out-scoring Perez at every race since.
Indeed, in recent races the gap between the pair in qualifying has become worryingly large for Perez. While Verstappen’s huge championship lead is in little realistic danger, there is a widening margin between the Red Bull drivers which Ferrari, and increasingly Mercedes, can capitalise on.
Perez vs Verstappen qualifying performance
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Perez vs Verstappen season summary
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2022 F1 season
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