On paper, Sergio Perez was a shoo-in for a slot in our top ten F1 drivers of 2023. He was one of two not named Max Verstappen to win a race and he finished second to the Dutchman in the world championship.
And yet, he’s not made the cut on ESPN’s list, which you can read in full here. It’s of course entirely subjective, but the fact this question is even open for debate highlights the kind of year Perez had. His form was so erratic that much of the narrative around him was whether he would still be driving for Red Bull in 2024. He will be, but that question will be lingering right on the surface next year.
Was his season really bad enough to not be considered top ten? As always, these things are about context. There’s a key caveat in the list compiled by my colleague Laurence Edmondson earlier this month that the rankings are “based on the car they had at their disposal, the stage they are at in their career and the expectations they faced going into the season,” so let’s break it down like that.
The car at his disposal
This is perhaps the most damming part of Perez’s year. The RB19 will go down as the most dominant car in modern F1 history – previously one-sided seasons of Michael Schumacher, Sebastian Vettel and Lewis Hamilton pale in comparison to what Verstappen achieved. Perez was blessed with one of the finest F1 cars any team has built in recent memory but finished with half the points tally of his teammate. While Red Bull celebrated constructors’ championship success, Verstappen’s results would have won it single-handedly.
You could argue Verstappen’s incredible form made the RB19 look better than it was, but the margin of many of his wins showed how much pace there was to find. While Verstappen may well have won the same number of races alongside an in-form Perez, his teammate should have been on the podium most weekends. From his second and final win in Baku onwards, Perez visited the podium just six times — in the same timespan, Lando Norris had seven podiums, while Hamilton and Charles Leclerc had five each, the three of them doing so in cars inferior to the RB19.
For whatever reason Perez just couldn’t get on top of it. The Mexican driver’s problems seemed to be rooted in qualifying, where poor performances often put his RB19 out of position and forced him to play catch up in the race. A heavy crash in qualifying at the Monaco Grand Prix, a race he won 12 months prior, summed up the season that was to follow, leaving him with the…
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