Whether Sergio Perez will be allowed to continue racing for Red Bull in 2025 is not decided by Helmut Marko and Christian Horner, but by the shareholders of Red Bull GmbH
The celebrations for Max Verstappen’s fourth world championship triumph were so great after the race in Las Vegas that Sergio Perez’s persistent lack of form was hardly discussed in the interviews late on Saturday evening. And yet nothing significant has changed in the situation. In the paddock, the feeling remains that the Mexican could be fired despite having a contract for 2026.
In any case, Perez has done little to consolidate his shaky position in Las Vegas. 16th place in qualifying and 10th place in the race, behind Yuki Tsunoda in the B-Team Racing Bulls, was probably not enough to convince the team management to stick with him. Especially when your teammate can become world champion with the same car.
Helmut Marko, however, is still not giving anything away on the subject: “There will be a meeting after Abu Dhabi, and the result of that meeting will be presented to the shareholders. They will then decide what the driver situation for both teams will look like for next year,” said the Red Bull motorsport consultant in an interview with ORF.
This is an exciting statement in that it suggests that the decision will ultimately be made neither by Marko nor by team principal Christian Horner, but by the shareholders of Red Bull GmbH. And these are, on the one hand, the Thai Yoovidhya clan with 51 percent of the voting rights and, on the other, Mark Mateschitz with 49 percent.
The fact that the Perez question has now been declared a matter for the boss could also have something to do with the fact that a driver swap at Red Bull Racing would have significant economic implications. Perez brings in plenty of sponsorship money for the team and is an important driving force in the Latin American market. And it would cost “pain money” to terminate his contract prematurely.=
Unclear: How expensive would a sacking really be?
No one outside the inner circle of the Red Bull paddock knows exactly how much it would cost to fire Perez. In Las Vegas, the German-language TV broadcasts spoke of up to 20 million dollars. This is roughly the difference in prize money between first and third place in the constructors’ championship.
Marko has criticized Perez’s performance several times in 2024. Horner has usually been more diplomatic. But the team boss also seems to be running out of patience: “Checo scored a point,” he said on Saturday evening in Las Vegas. “We started too far back, on a weak day for McLaren. Ideally, we would have liked to have made up more ground on McLaren.”
How Perez explains his performance in Las Vegas
The explanations that Perez presents after almost every one of his poor race results are now falling on deaf ears. In Las Vegas, he says, he was “a little caught off guard by the extent of the tire degradation. We didn’t expect it to degrade that much. Unfortunately, that hurt us quite a bit.”
Perez also explains that he had “the best tires at the wrong time”, had to drive a long middle stint and was therefore “vulnerable”. Even though Horner attests that he showed “a good fightback” after the disappointing qualifying, with one or two nice overtaking maneuvers.
Perez is convinced: “We are close to turning things around. The pace is there, it is coming. We are making progress and we understand exactly what happened in qualifying. We should have done a better job. But we didn’t. We will work hard as a team to do better in the last two races.”
Was Verstappen’s class poor for Perez?
This sounds like a broken record to many people, with the needle stuck. “It’s not just this year,” sighs Red Bull’s technical director Pierre Wache, for example. “Max is simply better at handling a different type of car than Checo. It’s obvious. And he gets more performance out of it than any other driver.“
”Maybe it was also a bit due to Max that our problems were hidden because he overdrove the problems and they only really came to light in Monza, with low downforce. But fast cars are usually difficult to drive. A car that is comfortable to drive will never win in Formula 1,” explains Wache.
Or, to put it another way: at Red Bull, they seem to accept that the current RB20 is a difficult car to drive. But because Verstappen manages to be successful with it, the fault cannot lie with the technology, but rather with the cockpit. Not the best conditions for ultimately retaining Perez.