No ‘two alphas’ in Red Bull’s longest-running F1 driver line-up · RaceFans

Red Bull’s decision to extend Sergio Perez’s contract for two more years means their current line-up will become the longest in the team’s history.

Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber were team mates at Red Bull for five years from 2009 until the latter’s retirement at the end of 2013. But Perez’s new two-year deal will keep him at the team until the end of 2026, his sixth season alongside Max Verstappen.

(Assuming, of course, Perez’s “two year” extension is exactly what Red Bull say it is. After all, in September last year Mercedes announced Lewis Hamilton “will drive for the team in the 2024 and 2025 seasons,” overlooking a clause which allowed him to become a Ferrari driver next year.)

On the face of it, there are obvious reasons why Red Bull would make this call. Though the competition have closed on them, Red Bull are nonetheless enjoying their second period as F1’s leading team, and there is little to gain and too much to lose by tampering with a winning formula in their driver line-up.

The key word here is “formula” as only one half of it is doing the “winning”. In much the same way, in Perez’s 150-word statement on his new deal the most significant term is “challenge”, which he used to describe driving for the team no fewer than three times.

Unrepresentative comparisons omitted. Negative value: Perez was faster; Positive value: Verstappen was faster

Small wonder, as Perez has secured his contract extension despite not having won a race in the past 12 months. This is also true of most drivers in F1, but none of them have a team mate who has won 20 races over the same period of time with the same car.

There are strong similarities between Red Bull’s current driver line-up and that during its last period of dominance. It has a product of its young driver programme racking up race victories and championships, paired with a more experience racer from outside the Red Bull ecosystem filling a clear ‘number two’ role.

The Vettel-Webber pairing became fraught at times, notably when they collided at Istanbul Park in 2010 or during the infamous ‘Multi 21’ episode at Sepang three years later. Relations have generally been less strained between Verstappen and Perez, besides a quarrel over an exchange of positions in Brazil in 2022 and murmurs the reigning champion had suspicions over his team mate’s tactics during qualifying in Monaco that year.

Late last year Christian Horner claimed he had an approach…