No driver measured up well against Max Verstappen in 2023, so it was hardly surprising that much attention was focused on how far away his team mate was.
Sergio Perez was Verstappen’s closest championship rival. But following the first four rounds of the year there was little rivalry to speak of. Over the rest of the season, Verstappen left his team mate far behind, and it took Perez until the penultimate round of the season to put a lock on the runner-up spot in the championship.
Perez ended the year with less than half of his team mate’s points tally – just 49.6%. The last team mate of a world champion to do so poorly by this measure was Perez himself, in 2021, though few took note as Verstappen was embroiled in a close title fight with Lewis Hamilton. This year was quite different. Prior to that, the last driver to score a lower percentage of his title-winning team mate’s score was Giancarlo Fisichella in 2005, when his team mate Fernando Alonso triumphed for Renault.
No driver has spent longer as Verstappen’s team mate than Perez, who now has three full years and 66 races on the books alongside the benchmark talent in F1 today. He famously arrived as Verstappen’s fourth different team mate in the space of little more than two years as Red Bull tried to find a suitable replacement for Daniel Ricciardo, who gave up the role at the end of 2018.
The crushing nature of Perez’s defeat this year means the question must again be asked whether he has performed significantly better than those who were cast aside more quickly. Does his lap time deficit to Verstappen in qualifying really look that much better than, for example, Pierre Gasly’s over his 12 races at Red Bull before being demoted mid-season?
When Perez joined Red Bull in 2021, the team was using a mildly developed version of its previous car, and his unfamiliarity with it relative to Verstappen was understood to put him at a disadvantage. That appeared to change at the beginning of last season, when new technical regulations were introduced. Over the season Verstappen gained the upper hand, but Perez still scored more than two-thirds of his team mate’s points tally – a clear improvement.
But this year Perez regressed severely, at least after the first four races. While Verstappen said he made a breakthrough in understanding the RB19’s handling as he followed his victorious team mate home in Baku, Perez found the car more of a handful as the…
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