Finding the right #2 driver is as much art as science. Teams need someone talented enough to score podiums, and savvy enough to understand their role. Make a mistake, and your #1 driver can spend the season dragging dead weight, particularly in the fight for the constructor’s title. Which brings us to Sergio Pérez.
Red Bull Racing brought Pérez aboard for 2021 to complement then-wunderkind Max Verstappen. Over that season and the next two, the Mexican driver largely held up his end of the bargain, delivering podiums and backing a dynastic run for Red Bull and Verstappen. Especially in 2022 and 2023, Sergio Pérez represented the ideal No. 2 driver — a constructor’s championship cheat code.
Then 2024 happened.
Where Pérez scored between 32 and 40 percent of Red Bull’s points each of his first three years with the team, he was an anchor in 2024, delivering a paltry 26.1 percent of the team’s 581 points. Red Bull slipped to third in the constructors’ standings despite Verstappen hoisting his fourth consecutive driver’s title. As Verstappen clinched his fourth world championship at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Pérez notched a single point. The man who’d been a bear as a #2 driver had become an albatross.
It all made us wonder: Where did Pérez’s woeful season stack up in the annals of bad campaigns by a top driver’s team-mate? So we crunched the numbers, looking at data from every Formula 1 season, to figure out out which team-mates had been the least helpful for the contending teams. Turns out, since 1958, 14 teams have finished in the top two of the constructor’s championship with one driver scoring 75 percent (or more) of team’s points.
Below are the most lopsided F1 driver tandems ever. The good news — for Checo, at least — is that there have been worse team-mates than his 2024 run. Just not by much.
The Least Helpful team-mates Ever: 1972 Lotus
Emerson Fittipaldi
Photo by: Sutton Images
Emerson Fittipaldi: 61 points (100%)
David Walker and Reine Wisell: 0 points (0%)
Meet the gold standard for ineffective team-mates in Formula 1. Fittipaldi might have known he was in for a solo show when the FIA disqualified Walker from the year’s first race, the Argentine Grand Prix, for receiving outside assistance. He single-handedly dragged the team to the title when his team-mates had extremely trouble staying eligible for races, let alone finishing them with their cars intact.
In a season with…
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