Christian Horner and Sergio Perez talk
Christian Horner has declared Red Bull’s “priority” is to ensure Sergio Perez turns his season around with the team confirming he will remain a Red Bull driver.
Having announced that, the goal now is to do whatever is required to rebuild the driver’s confidence and get him back into podium contention.
Red Bull’s ‘priority’ is to ‘support’ Sergio Perez
Weeks of speculation, capped by a crunch meeting of the Red Bull higher-ups, concluded on Monday evening when Horner announced to the Red Bull personnel in Milton Keynes that Perez “remains a Red Bull Racing driver, despite all the speculation of late“.
The decision was made despite the Mexican driver’s struggles continuing at the Belgian Grand Prix where he was not only unable to convert his front row grid slot into a podium result but finished behind Max Verstappen even though he lined up nine places ahead.
Sunday’s result meant Perez has not featured on the podium once in the last nine races and slipped to seventh in the Drivers’ standings where he’s on 131 pints to Verstappen’s 277.
Perez is also the only driver from the top four teams; Red Bull, McLaren, Ferrari and Mercedes, who has not won a race this season.
Horner is backing the 34-year-old to turn it around.
“Checo is a great team player, and he’s a massive team player, and that’s why he was selected,” the team boss told the media including PlanetF1.com at Spa.
“That’s why we took him at the end of 2020 to put alongside Max and he’s won six, seven races for us [five, ed’s note], second in the World Championship last year, goodness knows how many podiums.
“It’s been the most successful combination we’ve ever had as a driver pairing.
“What’s frustrating for everybody is Checo struggling because nobody wants to see him struggle. Everybody wants to see him succeed.
“The team has been and is right behind him. Everybody wants to see him succeed because it hurts seeing him in the situation that he is.”
He added: “The priority is to support Checo and to understand what he what he needs. We all want him to turn it around, we all want to see him deliver.”
Sergio Perez’s deficit to Max Verstappen laid bare
Adamant that Red Bull did not “want to make that decision” to drop Perez, Horner said: “In the team, we want to get him we want to get him going, we want to understand…
“You see glimpses of his race pace; last weekend was strong, the fourth best race pace in Budapest, but he had a difficult Saturday with a crash in qualy; did a good job yesterday, to put it five hundreds of Charles [Leclerc] on a scrubbed set of tyres and put it on the front row, it was a tremendous effort. Today, his race faded.
“He’s acutely aware of anybody that we need both cars performing and which is what we had at the beginning of the year. That’s where we need to get back to.”
Out-scored by McLaren at Spa, Red Bull are just 42 points ahead of the Woking team in the race for the Constructors’ Championship.
