“It wasn’t all Pérez’s fault”

It’s official since yesterday, Max Verstappen will have a new teammate at Red Bull in 2025. After teaming up with Daniel Ricciardo, Pierre Gasly, Alexander Albon then Sergio Pérez, the four-time reigning world champion will have Liam Lawson at his side.

For Max Verstappen, it is the end of a four-season collaboration with Sergio Pérez, who has sometimes been a strong ally, especially in 2021, and especially very rarely an embarrassing garage neighbor. If the Mexican is obviously paying the price for a failed 2024 campaign which deprived Red Bull of fighting to the end to defend its world constructors’ title, he retains a lot of respect for the Dutchman.

While he had recently estimated that “people were very harsh” with Sergio Pérez, Max Verstappen once again defended the one who now finds himself without a steering wheel for 2025, after 14 years spent in Formula 1. While recognizing that the defense of the constructors’ title “was a total failure”he refuses to put everything on his teammate’s back.

Confidence takes a hit and some people are more sensitive to it than others.

“It was difficult for Checo”he insists in an end-of-season interview given to Viaplay in the Netherlands. “And I don’t think it was always his fault. We also had a very difficult car, we can point out that. I obviously don’t want to criticize him at all. He’s just my teammate, I get along very good with him. But I can also clearly say that it wasn’t all his fault that things went wrong.”

“The biggest problem we had this season was that the car wasn’t working. And of course I know Checo’s driving style. At one point the car we had was really difficult to drive , including for me, and that doesn’t help. We should have started working on it sooner, because that would have helped him a lot too.”

Max Verstappen points to Sergio Pérez’s successful start to the season as proof, which allowed Red Bull to score their three doubles of the year in Bahrain, Jeddah and Suzuka.

“At the start of the season he was second, third… everything was fine”he recalls. “But at some point it was really difficult. Confidence takes a hit and some people are more sensitive to it than others. So yeah, I think on a team level we didn’t have either does a great job.”

With Laurens Stade