Headline: Verstappen backs Perez’s Cadillac leap as family crossfire flares
Max Verstappen has offered a measured thumbs-up to Sergio Perez’s F1 return with Cadillac, even as a fresh round of family sniping erupted around the Mexican’s move.
The four-time World Champion said he messaged his former Red Bull teammate as soon as the news broke, calling Perez “a great guy” and welcoming him back to the grid. Typical Verstappen pragmatism followed: how good Checo looks in year one “will depend on how good the car is,” he said, but it’s “a new opportunity” and one you suspect Perez will grab with both hands.
That calm endorsement was drowned out, briefly, by the noise outside the cockpit. Antonio Pérez Garibay, never shy, argued his son would already be a World Champion “if he had the same car” as Verstappen during their four seasons together at Red Bull. He doubled down, crediting Perez with making Verstappen champion and pointing to Abu Dhabi 2021, when the Mexican famously delayed Lewis Hamilton to swing momentum back toward his teammate.
“Checo drove for Red Bull for four years,” Pérez Garibay said. “How many years did Red Bull become champion? Four years. Checo Perez has made Verstappen champion. If Checo had had the same car, he would be the World Champion now.”
You can guess how that landed in the Verstappen camp. Jos Verstappen slapped it down on X with the subtlety of a turn-one divebomb: “What an idiot that guy is. He was always given the same material. But just needed to step on the gas.”
The results sheet wasn’t kind to Perez after the high of 2021. He finished runner-up to Verstappen in 2023 with 285 points to Verstappen’s 575, then slipped to eighth a year later. Red Bull, unhappy with the trend and its knock-on effect in the Constructors’ fight, terminated his deal. Eight months later, the 35-year-old has a multi-year lifeline with Cadillac, the fresh face on the grid and a rare new works presence in modern F1.
There’s a reason this hire makes sense. For all the static around him, Perez remains one of the sport’s finest wheel-to-wheel defenders and a seasoned operator who understands how to build a season on Sundays. That’s gold dust for a start-up. If Cadillac are serious about growing fast, a driver who can give clear development feedback, expose the car’s edges without binning it, and cash in when chaos strikes is exactly the profile you want.
The romance of Abu Dhabi 2021 still lingers. Verstappen himself called Perez a “legend” that night, admitting he “wouldn’t be sitting here right now” without his teammate’s defensive heroics that helped pave the way to a first title. That memory is baked into this story, because it colors how both fanbases see Perez: to some, the ultimate teammate; to others, the driver who never quite converted a title-capable car into a proper challenge.
Perez’s father clearly sits in the first camp, and he’s not wrong that the sport’s memory of 2021 gave Checo a longer runway. The flipside is brutal. In the Verstappen era, your benchmark is the most ruthless metric in racing. Same garage, same paint, same stopwatch. Over a full season, you either live with Max or you don’t. Perez had bursts — early 2023, Baku chief among them — but never the full body of evidence to make a title push stick.
Cadillac changes the brief. There’s no need to match Verstappen. The target is clearer and far more attainable: establish a baseline, haul points, lead the team through the turbulence of year one, and make everyone forget the exit headlines. His experience will matter more than his peaks.
And Verstappen’s reaction? Tellingly mature. No drama, no dunking on old wounds — just a quick text and a realistic appraisal of what comes next. The friendship between them always seemed genuine inside the ropes, even when the politics outside turned nasty. This week felt like more of the same.
The fathers will do what fathers do. The paddock, as ever, will keep score the old-fashioned way. When the Cadillac turns a wheel in anger, all that matters is whether Perez can put it in the right places and drag it somewhere ahead of where it deserves to be. If he does, the noise will fade. If he doesn’t, it’ll only get louder.
Either way, F1’s newest project has found itself a headline act who knows exactly what the front of the field looks like, and how hard it is to survive there. That’s not a bad place to start.
