Azerbaijan Grand Prix: Sergio Perez convinced he can challenge Max Verstappen for F1 title

“It’s a long year ahead,” Perez said after shrugging off everything the two-time champion could throw at him and controlling the race around the streets of this city on the shores of the Caspian Sea. “We are in the fight.”

It was a highly consummate performance from Perez. Arguably – even if he was reluctant to say so himself – the best of his six Formula 1 victories.

Perez did, as Horner said, “get a little bit lucky with the safety car” but, once in the lead, he controlled the race. Throughout a tense grand prix, with both drivers pushing to the limit throughout, Verstappen had no answer for him.

2-2 between Verstappen and Perez

Perez’s win, together with his victory in Saudi Arabia two races ago, makes the score two-all between the Red Bull drivers so far this season.

The six-point lead Verstappen has is down entirely to a difficult qualifying day for Perez at the previous race in Australia, where technical issues left him down the grid and required a comeback drive. It was not by chance that Perez mentioned several times over the weekend that he and the team needed to avoid weekends like that.

There were no errors from Perez or his side of the garage this time, and he left Azerbaijan for the 15-hour flight to next weekend’s race in Miami with two wins under his belt – one in Saturday’s shorter ‘sprint’ and another in the grand prix – to make it an almost perfect weekend.

And while it is true to say Perez was gifted the lead by the timing of the safety car, that is not the same as saying he lucked into the win.

Perez closed in on Verstappen once both were past the pole-winning Ferrari of Charles Leclerc and was putting him under pressure. Verstappen radioed that he was starting to run into tyre problems.

By the end of lap nine, Perez was just 0.6 seconds behind and felt he was on the point of passing his team-mate by using the DRS overtaking aid. At this point, Red Bull stepped in and stopped him getting the chance by calling Verstappen in for new tyres next time around.

The idea was to keep Verstappen in the lead but it backfired. Red Bull had seen the Alpha Tauri of Nyck de Vries in the run-off area at Turn Six but miscalculated.

They thought the incident was not enough to bring out the safety car, felt the Dutchman’s car was undamaged and he would reverse back on to the track, so brought Verstappen in, rather than waiting another lap for a safety car.

They were wrong. What they had not seen was that De Vries had clouted the inside wall and broken his front suspension. He was not going anywhere. The safety car was deployed just after Verstappen’s stop, giving Perez and Leclerc cheap stops and vaulting them back ahead of Verstappen.

Verstappen had to pass Leclerc again, which he did almost immediately but, try as he might, he could not get within a second of his team-mate, the gap needed to activate the DRS overtaking aid. Perez controlled the margin and won the race.

The picturesque Azerbaijan Grand Prix is set to stay on the Formula 1 calendar until 2026

Mixed messages

Horner described the safety car timing as “unfortunate”. But it is far from a given that Verstappen was going to win this race without it. The cards fell for Perez, who grabbed his luck and ran with it.

And there were mixed messages from Verstappen and Red Bull afterwards. The radio message about tyre wear was clear. And Horner admitted that Verstappen was “starting to struggle a little bit with the rear” tyres. Yet Verstappen said afterwards that he “could have been a little more aggressive with the way I was using my tyres – I was a bit careful”.

Perez, meanwhile, felt the first stint, rather than the safety car itself, had defined his race.

“The first stint was very intense,” he said, “just making sure I stayed in the DRS and then once there pushing Max to make sure he used his tyres and that was one of the keys.

“Once I was in Max’s DRS, it made my race. It was time to overtake him, but he pitted and then we got the safety car and I got a bit lucky there.

“Then, once we used the hard compound (tyre), it was really hard to keep Max behind. I knew as soon as he got DRS, that’s it really, and to keep him behind was a massive challenge. We were really pushing each other.”

Tension between the two

So far, this season very much has echoes of last year when it comes to the battle between the Red Bull drivers, without the distraction of a competitive Ferrari.

In 2022, just as in 2023, Perez started the season strongly and was being talked of after a few races as a potential title contender.

The peak of that was Monaco, where Perez won. After that, his season fell away, as the Red Bull car was developed, lost weight and Verstappen found it more responsive, better suited to him and soon left Perez behind.

Monaco last year was a turning point in other ways too. It was also the weekend where the relationship between the two drivers started to fray.

Perez crashed on his final run in qualifying, preventing anyone else from improving their times. That secured a front-row lock-out for Ferrari and also third place for Perez ahead of Verstappen, who was on a faster lap that he thought would put him on the front row, only to have to abort it when the session was red flagged.

Later that day, someone pointed out to Verstappen that they thought Perez had crashed deliberately. Verstappen looked at the data and came to the same conclusion.

He was not a happy man. The way Verstappen saw it, here was Perez for the first time in a strong position and at the first opportunity that had arisen, he had cheated his team-mate.

Which is why, later in the year, when the title was already in Verstappen’s pocket and Perez was trying to secure second in the championship against Leclerc, the Dutchman refused team orders to swap positions when they were running in sixth and seventh places in Brazil. After that, there was a bit of a public row.

Red Bull claim this is now all behind them. But, as Horner put it when talking this weekend about Verstappen’s clash with Mercedes driver George Russell in the sprint race, Verstappen “is like an elephant”, he doesn’t forget these things.

That street track strength

Horner was asked after the race on Sunday whether he felt Perez could sustain his challenge to Verstappen. His answer alluded to the reality that, just as in 2023, the season started with a series of street tracks.

“He just needs to do it at a normal track,” Horner said. “He has excelled at street circuits. All his victories for us have been at street tracks. He just needs to get going on the proper circuits.”

Verstappen, too, is aware of this.

“We clearly have the fastest car,” he said, “but I have been in this position before and it’s about consistency. We all know that.

“It’s a very long season, lots of different tracks coming up. So far, the tracks are a bit stop-start and not the full-on race tracks with fast corners which I seem to enjoy a little more.

“But Checo has been really on it, really performing well. He is feeling more and more confident in the car and for the team we are really enjoying it.

“Checo and I are having a good time and that is important. You need to acknowledge and appreciate when someone has done a great job and that is what happened today. We continue fighting all season and that’s normal.”

Perez said: “Jeddah, here, it was two strong weekends for me. I was pushed by Max from beginning to end. So also I have done very good races like Singapore (last year), when I was pushed by Charles.

“I wouldn’t say this is my best ever. It was just a very good race where I pushed from the start to the end without mistakes and, when you do that, you believe you can beat anyone. It is about keeping it up.

“We want to beat each other. I want to win the championship as much as Max wants to, but there is a lot of respect between us and we are similar in the way we think about the sport. I don’t think it will change. We will fight as hard as we can but with a very high level of respect to us and the team.”

Horner said that, right now, his bigger concern was building a buffer for both drivers against the rest because of his fear that others may close in later in the season as the research and development restrictions imposed on Red Bull as a penalty for breaking the budget cap start to bite.

But so large is Red Bull’s advantage at the moment that it is hard to see anyone else butting into the drivers’ private battle.

If Perez is going to take Verstappen all the way, he is going to have to find a level of consistency of performance he has never achieved before. He knows it, too. The hard part will be pulling it off. – bbc.com