After months of rumours and pressure over his seat, Sergio Perez is no longer a Red Bull driver – and out of Formula 1 altogether, at least as far as 2025 is concerned.
And while Red Bull hasn’t named his replacement, the identity of who will partner Max Verstappen in 2025 – all but certain to be Liam Lawson – looks a whole lot clearer than Perez’s F1 future, as the six-time race winner’s hopes now rest on a 2026 return if he is to extend his grand prix career.
Has Red Bull made the correct decision? Has it made it too late? What state is Perez’s reputation in now? And has Red Bull missed the chance to get its house in order?
Our team have their say:
Perez ended up spoiling a great reputation
Matt Beer
When Red Bull made the correct call to ditch Alex Albon for Perez at the end of 2020, we collated an article on the races that doomed Albon – the particular pace drop-offs or missed chances that proved he wasn’t the back-up Verstappen needed.
There was no point collating an equivalent article for Perez because the list of races to include would’ve been: ‘all of them’.
Which is actually a real shame, because the extent and cost for the team of Perez’s Red Bull decline has been such that it’s now too easy to forget how good he was at his best. Not just all the underdog heroics pre-Red Bull, but early in his Red Bull stint too.
Verstappen would not have been 2021 champion without Perez’s intervention in Abu Dhabi that trimmed the Lewis Hamilton-to-Verstappen gap enough to take away Hamilton’s safety margin. The wins Perez took were genuinely superb.
He could’ve been exiting F1 with a great reputation as an against-the-odds hero of the 2010s and one of the best ‘wingmen’ to a great of the modern era. Instead he’s departing as the guy who cost Red Bull a constructors’ title. And that’s why, even though I have zero certainty that his replacement is going to do any better, he had to go now.
The timing is an injustice, but not the decision
Glenn Freeman
There’s no injustice in Red Bull’s decision to drop Perez. If the gap in points between him and Verstappen this year (285) was a points tally of its own, it would be fifth in the championship. Even allowing for Red Bull’s difficulties at times this year, you can’t be that far off it.
But there is some injustice in the timing of the decision being too late for Perez to find another drive on the grid. Had he been on the market while midfield seats were available, there would have been teams seriously considering him.
Sure, he’s broken as a Red Bull driver right now, but he’s always excelled in lesser teams and I reckon he could again.
Perez was never going to voluntarily walk away from the longer-term contract Red Bull inexplicably gave him earlier this year but, if the team has known for a while that it wanted to drop him, it’s a shame it couldn’t resolve the situation sooner to give him a chance to find another race seat for 2025.
Driver strategy is catching up with Red Bull
Edd Straw
This latest chapter in the seemingly endless saga of confusion that is Red Bull’s F1 driver strategy is inevitable, but most concerningly it’s unlikely to be the end point it needs to be.
Red Bull is in the best-possible position when it comes to its drivers given it has the luxury of a second team to prepare drivers in, yet it’s an opportunity that’s consistently been squandered.
Once again, the proverbial deckchairs on the Titanic are being re-arranged without solving the big-picture problems that plague its driver strategy. What really matters now is that, in the background, Red Bull gets back in control of a situation that has been unsatisfactory ever since Daniel Ricciardo left the team at the end of 2018.
The trouble is, signing Perez in the first place should have created the breathing space needed to do just that. An experienced, proven campaigner who could do the job for a year or two, buy some time for Red Bull to get its house in order and become self-sustaining again on the driver front.
Throughout this, Red Bull has been saved by having Max Verstappen on its books – just as it had Ricciardo and Sebastian Vettel before that as its spearheads. But the cracks showed in 2024 as it lost the constructors’ championship and with the fears that Verstappen might force a move before the end of his current contract, Red Bull can’t continue to leave this to chance.
The whole purpose of a driver development programme, and having a second team, is to take control of the training and supply of drivers. Red Bull can’t continue to waste this opportunity because it’s now catching up with it on track.
Why did Red Bull give Perez a 2026 deal?
Val Khorounzhiy
Now that the decision is taken and the separation is official, we can all definitively say in unison – what on earth was up with that mid-2024 contract extension until 2026?
It’s aged like milk, yes, but it was already spoiled milk when it was signed.
Red Bull had a two-year sample size under the ruleset to know very well that Perez had struggled under the current regulations cycle.
If it was fooled by his early-2024 form – stronger than his late-2023 form, yes, but also obviously flattered by the field-dominating performance of the RB20 at that point – then that’s very hard to excuse. Although that’s still a better explanation than Christian Horner’s recent suggestion that the deal was agreed in order to calm Perez’s nerves.
Good on Perez for holding out for a payoff, and you almost wish an F1 driver salary cap was in place to punish Red Bull further for its act of contract hubris.
It was a decision based not on data but on comfort, not on the observable evidence of an already-closing F1 field spread but the wishful thinking that Red Bull’s dominance would go on forever and thus a three-five tenths gap between its two cars is palatable.
The gap was a lot more than that by the end of the season, and Red Bull won’t have seen that coming. And obviously any F1 contract decision is easy to judge with the power of hindsight – but it is truly something to see a top F1 operation whiff like this.
Perez had his chance
Gary Anderson
The big question is always ‘when is the right time?’.
It’s never easy to identify that and I think Red Bull has given Perez as many opportunities as it could, even giving him that contract extension through to 2026 to see if that would mentally stabilise him and allow him to find the solutions for why he was struggling.
It’s easy to say that Red Bull should build a car that would suit Perez better and if it did that he might just get some better results with a few podium positions at best, however its philosophy is to build as fast a car as possible and it believes if it does that Verstappen will win races and championships in it.
Red Bull finishing third in the constructors’ championship behind McLaren and Ferrari was probably the last nail in Perez’s coffin. The roughly $20million loss in that alone plus any pay-off and loss of sponsorship from his Mexican partners will probably double that loss, but its the long-term picture that it needs to look at.
I am not a believer that someone like Carlos Sainz or Nico Hulkenberg would be the answer to its requirements. Red Bull is looking for another Verstappen and to find him, it needs to give an up-and-coming driver a shot.
Lawson initially showed promise in mid-2023 but that sort of fizzled out when Daniel Ricciardo returned from injury. However, he kept his focus and Red Bull will have all the information it needs to make the decision between him and Tsunoda.
As for who gets chosen, their time at Red Bull might be limited if they don’t show the potential that is expected of them – but at least they will have had a chance.
Perez had nowhere to hide
Ben Anderson
If Red Bull had maintained its 2023 level of dominance, or the level of dominance it showed across the first five races of 2024, then it probably could have afforded to carry Sergio Perez – even at his underwhelming Imola-onwards level.
But F1’s top teams converging in performance this year has exposed an obvious limitation for Red Bull. Max Verstappen defended his drivers’ championship brilliantly, but he was never going to defend the constructors’ championship solo with Ferrari and McLaren able to close the performance deficit as they did – and when they each had two drivers performing at such a high level.
The timing of the contract extension – for two years! – when Perez’s decent early form had already begun to slide, never made any sense. Christian Horner claims it was done with the aim of trying to motivate Perez to improve, but convention suggests stick usually works better than carrot for F1 teams in this regard.
Moreover, it made no sense at all for Red Bull, which could have afforded to wait and see on the form of Perez, Ricciardo, Tsunoda and then Lawson – or even have signed free agent Sainz! This all just made the process more difficult.
Perez has undoubtedly been a dutiful team servant, and a useful foil for Verstappen at times. But that has been less and less so as time has gone on. And a team-mate performing at midfield level in a race-winning car – no matter now difficult that car might be to make work at times – is simply no use at all.
It felt like Red Bull probably should have flicked Perez last winter – and then he could have landed at Williams maybe – but Red Bull getting the constructors’ championship over the line seemed to rescue him.
This season, there has simply been nowhere for Perez to hide.
